How to credit an icon set

Crediting an icon set does two jobs. It meets whatever the license requires, and it tells other people where the icons came from, so they can find the source, check the license and report problems to the right place. The first is an obligation; the second is good practice. This guide covers both, with wording you can adapt and the places credits usually go.

This is general information about common practice, not legal advice. Always read the license that ships with the icons you use.

What the license actually asks for

Licenses differ in what counts as attribution. For the ones you'll meet most often with icon sets:

Under MIT, the notice has to travel with the files, but it can live in a licenses file or page rather than on screen; the guide to the MIT license explains the condition in detail. Under CC BY, the credit itself is the main requirement, and the license lets you provide it in any reasonable manner based on the medium, which usually means a caption near the work or a credits page. The comparison of open source icon licenses covers each license in more depth.

Even where no visible credit is required, adding one is a small courtesy to the people who maintain the set.

What a good credit says

A complete credit answers four questions: what, by whom, under which license, and where to find it. A short visible credit can be one line:

Crypto logos from the web3icons library, used under the MIT License.
Logos are trademarks of their respective owners.

The full notice, for a licenses page or file, copies the copyright line and license text exactly as they appear in the set's own LICENSE file:

web3icons
License: MIT

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders, as written in the set's LICENSE file>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), ...
[the rest of the license text, unchanged]

Don't rewrite or shorten the copyright line. Copy it, so the notice matches the original.

Where the credit goes

Websites and web apps

Two places, each for a different reader:

• A footer line or an about page for people. Keep it small; it doesn't need to compete with your content.
• A third-party licenses page or file for the license texts, such as /licenses or /third-party-notices.txt, listing each library and asset set with its license. Many teams generate this from their code dependencies at build time; assets you copied in by hand, like an icon folder, need to be added to it manually.

export function Footer() {
  return (
    <footer className="site-footer">
      <p>
        Crypto logos from the web3icons library (<a href="/licenses#web3icons">MIT License</a>).
        Logos are trademarks of their respective owners.
      </p>
    </footer>
  )
}

Repositories and packages

When icon files are committed to your repository, keep the set's LICENSE file beside them, plus a short note on where they came from:

src/assets/crypto-icons/
  LICENSE      # copied unchanged from the icon set
  SOURCE.md    # where the files came from, when, and what you changed
  eth.svg
  usdc.svg

That note saves a lot of digging later: which version you copied, on what date, and whether you recolored or trimmed anything. If your project keeps a THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES file, add an entry there as well.

Mobile and desktop apps

Apps usually collect licenses on a screen called Acknowledgements, Open source licenses or Legal, reached from Settings or About. Add the icon set there alongside your code dependencies, with the full license text. Tooling can generate the list for code dependencies on some platforms, but hand-copied assets still need to be added manually.

Design files and UI kits

For a Figma file or kit you share or sell, add a Credits page or frame with the credit line and the license text. If you distribute the kit as a download, include the LICENSE file in the archive too. People who duplicate your file then inherit the credit along with the icons.

Slides, documents and print

Under permissive licenses, a visible credit is usually optional in these formats. If you want one, a small line on the last slide or in the colophon is enough. For CC BY material, put the credit near the image or on a credits slide.

When you've modified the icons

Changing the icons doesn't remove the original authors' copyright in what you started from, so the original notice stays. What changes is how you describe the result:

• Under MIT or ISC, nothing extra is required. Keep the original notice; you can add your own copyright line for your changes.
• Under CC BY 4.0, you must indicate that you changed the material. "Adapted from" wording covers it.
• Under Apache 2.0, modified files must carry a prominent notice that you changed them, and any NOTICE file contents still need to be passed on.

Wording for a modified set:

Icons adapted from the web3icons library (MIT License):
redrawn on a 20 px grid and recolored to match our interface.
Logos are trademarks of their respective owners.

Saying what you changed helps even when the license doesn't ask for it. If an icon looks wrong, people know whether to report it to you or to the original set. The guide on modifying brand logos covers which changes to a logo are reasonable in the first place.

Credit the set, not the brands

Crypto logos have a second layer. The icon set's authors drew and packaged the artwork; the logos themselves are trademarks of the projects they represent. Crediting the set says nothing about the brands, and an icon license can't grant any rights to them. A line such as "Logos are trademarks of their respective owners" keeps that distinction clear, and it's worth including even in a one-line credit.

Checklist

• The full license text ships with every copy of the icon files you distribute.
• A licenses page, file or screen lists the icon set and its license.
• A visible credit is in place where the license requires one, and ideally even where it doesn't.
• Changes are described where the license requires it.
• The credit separates the icon set from the trademarks of the brands it depicts.