About TransparentCraft

Why we built it

The icon market for web designers is bigger than it has ever been, but it is also more frustrating than it has ever been. Stock libraries are bloated with low-quality assets that do not share a visual language. Free packs are riddled with paywalls and licensing traps. Search engines surface the same handful of pages from the same handful of sites, often with broken downloads or watermarked previews that fail when you actually try to use them in production. We wanted a place where every link works, every download is a true transparent PNG, and every asset traces back to a clear, attributable source.

TransparentCraft was conceived as a long-form, content-rich answer to that frustration. The site treats icons less like inventory and more like editorial — every icon, category, and tag has a real page with a real description, and the navigation is designed for browsing, not just searching. The hope is that you'll wander through the library the way you'd wander through a stationery shop, picking up a few small things you didn't know you needed.

How the library is built

The icon assets shown on this site are drawn from the OpenMoji project, an open-source emoji and icon library released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. OpenMoji is a multi-year project led by the University of Applied Sciences in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, with hundreds of contributing designers. The collection currently spans more than four thousand icons across activities, animals, food, nature, objects, people, smileys, symbols, and travel — all designed with a coherent visual language and all available as transparent PNGs.

To build the TransparentCraft library, we run a one-time PHP CLI seed script that fetches the OpenMoji metadata file, downloads the corresponding PNG renderings into the project's public asset directory, and writes a normalised JSON index. The page templates you see on this site read that JSON at request-time and render plain HTML. There's no database, no build pipeline, no JavaScript bundler — just PHP, JSON on disk, and a few hundred PNG files.

What we promise

Every icon on this site is a true transparent PNG. Every category and every tag has a permanent URL. Every download links back to the original source. We do not gate assets behind email signups, paywalls, or watermarks. If you find a broken link, an incorrect attribution, or an icon that should be removed, please send us a note via the contact page and we'll fix it.

TransparentCraft is intentionally a small, focused project. It does not try to be the biggest icon library on the web. Instead, it aims to be one of the most pleasant to browse, the easiest to attribute correctly, and the most stable to link to. If that's the kind of resource you've been looking for, we hope you'll bookmark a few category pages and come back the next time you need to fill an empty corner of a UI.