Silk Icons: The Most Popular Icons on the World Wide Web

Silk Icons – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution v2.5 License.

There is a great number if Internet users worldwide. This service has changed lives for all of us, helping us to evolve, to have better business and to easily keep in touch with one another. Besides the fact that is very comfortable and affording, no one gave a though to smaller things that make everything work better. For instance, the small icons we use so frequently were created by someone to make our activity run more easily and, why not, much more fun when using web applications. The most known and used category of icons are the silk icons, created by Mark James. In the following lines, these icons will be presented and discussed in a more detailed way, because the earned their importance in our everyday activity on the computer.

Mark James, a developer from Birmingham, UK, is responsible for the creation and development of silk icons. He decided to create a set of such icons, which are 16-by-16 pixel icons made in PNG format. PNG format means Portable Network Graphics and is the follower of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). PNG supports lossless data compression under the shape of graphics file format. As the set collection of these silk icons were growing, the author felt more and more motivated to increase their number up to the point where he managed to brag with a number of 1000 silk icons, all set up and ready to use. The best thing about the silk icons is that they are free. You can at any time access the web page of the author and download any set you feel like having and using on everyday basis. If you really feel like appreciating the work of the author by offering a certain money amount, you have this possibility by donating some.

Saying all these, there is almost impossible not to find suitable silk icons in this great number of 1000 pieces. It is admirable the will of the author to work on developing such a big range of these types of icons. Maybe you will find better looking icons over the Internet, but do not let yourself be fooled by their good looks because those one may come under the condition of paying a sum of money. Mark James preferred to keep silk icons simple because he concentrated upon offering people free material. As he uses to say, he finds it relaxing to build small and cute icons that can be available for everyone to use. Perhaps this is the main reason why people got to love and appreciate these silk icons and the reason why the web is so full of them. Just take a peek at the complete collection of silk icons and you will recognize on the sport about half of them, due to the fact that they are used almost in every web application present in our lives these days. Now you realize that the work of this single man has come to have a great impact over the fact how we manage to apprehend the way the web looks like.

So, it is right to say that no one ever thought on the effect these small icons can have on us and on the web. Just imagine how the web would look like without these silk icons. For sure it would not be the way we all know it today. And for this we have to thank Mark James for the patience and devotion he showed by creating this huge variety of silk icons. The web would have been such a dull place without them. Considering the big success these icons have had over time, maybe for some of us it is impossible to think how the author kept his position on doing them for free. If we think about the large number of silk icons and the even larger number of users in the entire world, then we can say that he had the possibility of raising quite a fortune is he decided to sell them or ask for a rental fee. But no, our author appreciated better the fun and relaxing time he gets by creating these icons and he wants us to enjoy them even better by offering them for free.

Now that we all know the story of these silk icons, about which no one ever thought that they could be so important because we are all so used to see them everywhere that we even might believe they appeared together with the Internet. They had a great contribution on building the web environment we are so familiar with and for this we should start to appreciate them more and their creator as well. Due to people like Mark James the world looks the way we know it and works the way we like so much. Their pleasure to create something great comes in the aid of obtaining a more functional environment for us all. Perhaps from now on you will spot silk icons much more easily when navigating in the web and you will be more sensitive to their existence, because they are there for you, whether you are working or just spending leisure time online. It is time to believe that small things have the power to chance the way we see future and, in this case, the way we use it. The appearance of silk icons was among the greatest thing that web could experience.