I’m happy to announce the availability of the first release 0.1 of Osmic (OSM Icons). Osmic is a collection of 100+ clean high quality SVG icons optimised for small sizes. The icons are licensed under Public Domain (or CC0).

Have a look at the Github repository: https://github.com/nebulon42/osmic

Over the last few months many of the available icons already found their way into the standard OSM map style leading to a crisper display of POIs. Thank you to all the people at osm-carto who helped in this process. Thank you for critique, discussion, ideas and improvement suggestions.

Credit goes also to those who inspired these icons, most notably Mapbox’ Maki, twain47’s Open-SVG-Map-Icons and HOT’s Maki extension called Nori.

How are these icons different from Maki?

Not so much. Maki became the main source of inspiration during this work, because they did a very good job in creating a clean and legible icon set. Osmic might be a bit closer to the needs of osm.org. On the other hand, Maki features icons in three different sizes, which is still a bit out of scope for Osmic but might become necessary later.

How are these icons different from twain47’s icons?

twain47 created one of the most complete and extensive icon sets for OSM and he did a great job. Osmic was created to address a few shortcomings regarding rendering icons at small sizes. This included reducing icon complexity and detail, not using different fill colours and aligning icons to the pixel grid. All of that should lead to a less blurry rendering at small sizes.