There are a lot of free icons (both vector and bitmap) floating around, but not many as nice as these. These icons would be perfect as bigger headlining graphics (here’s an example, but with uglier icons).
If minimalism is your thing, you have the always reliable Silk icons, which are popping up everywhere these days. By the way, there’s now a sprite version for Blueprint. A “sprite” is when you stick multiple images into one file and then display only parts of it at a time using the css background position property. Although it’s not very convenient in this case because you will rarely use all of Silk’s 700 icons on one page, in principle it can help decrease the number of http requests and improve loading times.
The more I think about it, the more I think widespread icon use is one of the not-so-obvious benefits of the “web 2.0″ design craze.
Oooh…. good links! Icon design is really tough: it takes a lot of time. Each icon is like a mini logo project and can easily take half a day or so to get right. Actually, I’m a bigger fan of the simpler icons in the second link to the web hosting company. The first set, I feel copies Apple’s look a bit much (if used on a non-Apple project) and overdoes the shine. Opinions differ, I guess.
FYI, They are not free, it’s stealed icons. The original owner Yellowicons, also price is 249$
Thanks for telling me ! Do you have a link to the original icons so that I can correct my post ?