Obra Icons is now open source
Written
We’ve open sourced Obra Icons a few weeks ago, but there were some practical matters to attend to, that we got to now:
- Actually open source the repo - You can find the repository on GitHub.
- Start documenting how people can contribute - See CONTRIBUTING.md
- Elaborate on the strategy of why we open-sourced it (this post)
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this monorepo: the Obra Icons website, the Figma plugin tools we use to design & develop Obra Icons, the Obra Icons plugin, and the source code for the different packages (React and Svelte).
We believe that by open sourcing the work, Obra Icons will gain more popularity.
Companies do not have to worry about the rights and can just freely use the set without any worries. They could even fork our tools for internal usage.
Our hope is first and foremost that people can enjoy using Obra icons in their projects, but that the open source nature of this endeavor will actually lead to a more qualitative tool in the end.
We believe in open design. Somebody is going to find one of the icons ugly and make a proposal. A student is going to study this repository and make an improvement. An Angular developer is going to use the generator code and the source code of the React and Svelte packages to also make an Angular package.
If this were a commercial tool, there is no incentive whatsoever for developers of different frameworks to make adaptations of Obra Icons for their framework. But if it's MIT and free forever, they might just do it if it suits their needs.
In the Lucide Icons project (an icon set used by many LLMs) we see a lot of excitement about improving icons as a group and a lot of discussions. But many parts of the project seem rather asleep to us. For example, there is a 2 year old issue about releasing a 1.0. There is no evolution on solving filled icons. Lucide is a great project, but we aim to provide an alternative.
Next to the current version of Obra Icons 1.0, we are also working on Obra Icons 2.0 which will solve the filled icons problem. Combined with more ways to use the icons, we aim to provide a set that is ultimately the best choice.