Free Flag Icons

Using flags in your visual design can be tempting but in my experience it's a bad idea. The problem is that certain flags force you to "take sides" in political disputes that you likely aren't aware of and don't understand. You'll inadvertently make one side very angry with you, and you won't even really know what political statement you accidentally made.<p>It's OK if you stick to flags you know but if you start trying to have a list of all flags, there's no way to do that without making various groups angry.<p>I don't doubt that there's a "right" answer to all disputes over flags but do you really know what all the disputes are and want to arbitrate them as part of developing your software ...<p>Deliberately not digging up specific disputes because the whole point is, if you have to ask what they are or if you start debating them case by case, maybe this wasn't a can of worms that needed opening.<p>(also, the last time I encountered this was long enough ago that I'm sure the relevant examples have changed, and I never understood them well to begin with. But it was clear that flags poked more than one political group in the eye.)

A bit of advice: avoid using flags altogether in your user interface unless you really, really need to refer to specific national/political entities. There's far too much room for error or offense, whether you're incorrectly assigning the wrong flag to a geographical region or have not represented the flag correctly. I haven't looked at the flag set, but I'm betting there are errors related to the correctness of layout, aspect ratios and colors and to the clarity of symbols and text.<p>Even more importantly, never use a flag to represent a language choice.<p>(* most major websites do avoid using flags, but one notable exception is Apple, which completely corrupts every single flag with their own shiny style: <a href="http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/</a> ...)

For people saying "don't use flags", and "especially not for languages"...<p>I totally agree in theory, but...<p>In a lot of interfaces, having something visual helps a lot. <i>Especially</i> when you need to pick something from a list where you don't even know what language the user speaks!<p>Obviously, you can present a text list like "English (American)", "Português (Brasil)", "አማርኛ", "贛語", but it can look kind of ugly, how do you decide to sort them, etc.<p>Plus, a lot of times the language <i>is</i> tied to a country, because each country has their spelling and grammar differences, etc. That's why many times you don't see "Portuguese" in language lists, but rather "Portuguese (Portugal)" and "Portuguese (Brazil)" -- because there's no such thing as a general-purpose Portuguese.<p>So while flags aren't perfect, a lot of the time they help far more than they hurt. In a perfect world, there would actually be language-specific icons that everyone recognized. Suggestions, anybody?

Under what license are they released? There is no licensing information on the page, or on the parent "freebies" page, or in the zip file itself.

The website flags these as "vector" - they are gorgeous and I'm wondering if the actual SVG versions are available?<p>If you want one particular flag (instead of many for language purposes), I think these are very fine.

No vector format? Don't get me wrong, these flags are appreciated, but to spend all that time making them in a bitmap format? Kinda seems like a bit of a waste, since flags seem PERFECT for vector format.

Wow, awesome. I'll definitely be using this. In fact this is so awesome I actually gave my real email address.

Thanks for the contribution. It would be great to have all flags, especially the small ones, in ONE file to avoid x requests on sites with many flags. Here is one idea: offer a service for people who need multiple country flags on their site to generate the one big flag picture set they need for their specific set of flags - one big country-selector that spits out a big flags.png after submit would be a great promo! Thanks!

It would help tremendously if the files were named by, say, ISO 2-letter country codes (where it applies).

What were the criteria for including some disputed states (South Ossetia, Somaliland) while excluding others (Transnistria, Azawad)?

I have heard about GoSquared, but have never tried it before. I just signed up and I'm truly amazed. The dashboard view is really useful feature. IMO this is as good as it gets for real-time website analytics. Awesome work guys!

I think it would be awesome if all these flag icons are hosted on a CDN and we can all link to it.

I find selecting country via flags of a global map to not only be alot quicker than a drop down list, but also more intuative. As somebody who lives in Britian/United Kingdom, then selecting via a flag or mini world map is much easier. Reason being from my point of view is often there is no UK/British option and your slotted in as American English in some forms of language selection. Now if the application ror website wish's to do that behind the scene then fine, but with lists you tend not to have that mapping and on flags or a global map your none the wiser. Also educational value and easier upon all cultures that way, some might prefer there drop down lists on the right, some on the left so this avoids that. All in all it offers more positives as apposed to negatives over dropdown lists for country/flag selection.<p>So the option to have icons you can freely use without accidently stepping upoon somebodies IP can only be a good thing and counter any arguments about flag copyrights and images. Amazing how even the simplest common items can be copyrighted - swiss clock being one even Apple slipped up upon. So some free ones are always good.

How long did they take to make?

Is anyone else surprised that in the age of "retina" displays, these only go up to 64px?

As someone that often designs things that are country / geographically specific this is a great collection. I also like it as an idea to drive traffic to your site. You're on my radar now and the other freebies look pretty slick too. Thanks! Definitely made the right impression.

Here's another set that goes up to 128px: <a href="http://icondrawer.com/flag-icons.php" rel="nofollow">http://icondrawer.com/flag-icons.php</a><p>They're free, but require attribution unless you buy a 'royalty-free license.'

Wow, they're beautiful!

Had to look up this one when I saw it was included: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mars" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mars</a>

I have been looking for high quality flag icons like these; I would be definitely using them in the future. Thanks!

Thanks!<p>Can't find any informations regarding a license (usage) ?!

Change log + details added as a .txt in the .zip

These guys have bluntly copied woopra.com