We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. And we support them financially and with a broad coverage in our magazine. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place. In fact, the results are quite often pretty impressive. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release a free Smashy The Alien icon set. The set contains 8 icons (RSS, news, home, download, contact, calendar, blog and Smashing) with a nice modest alien who is just too shy to show his face completely. You can use the set for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in .ico and .png-formats in resolutions 32×32px, 48×48px, 64×64px and 128×128px. If you love Smashing Magazine just like Smashy does feel free to place him on your blog.

This icon set was designed by Maja Bencic aka Abeja from Croatia especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download Icon Set For Free!

You can use the icons for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free, without any restrictions whatsoever. However, you are not allowed to sell or redistribute the icons without author’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission.

• PNG files (0.25 Mb)
• Windows icons (0.23 Mb)

Motivation behind the design

Maja contacted us through our contact form and asked if we are interested in some kind of cooperation. We were impressed by Maja’s work, so we have comissioned Maja to design a memorable, lively and beautiful icon set for our readers.

Here are some insights about the motivation behind the design from the designer herself:

I prefer clean and simple designs with lively colors and original elements such as icons. Since I love creating characters and try to include them often in my designs, I wanted to use them for a set of trendy and cute icons inspired with cartoons and picture books.

I think these icons could be used to make web-sites more lively and friendly no matter how serious they are supposed to be. At least that’s how I like my web-projects to be. I hope people will find a way for incorporating some or all of these icons into their designs.

I started as a web designer 6 years ago, but recently I do a lot of graphic design and illustrations as well. Some of my work is presented on my website abeja.org.

Maja Benčić

Thank you, Maja!

Want to showcase your work as well?

Please notice again: we are regularly looking for creative designers and artists and we are more than happy to support them financially and with a broad coverage in our magazine. If you think you can design a professional icon set, theme, wallpaper, typeface, screensaver or whatever — feel free to contact us. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.