Pinhead Map Icons

Why it's ranked here

Real projects vouch for this one. OpenStreetMap's iD editor ships Pinhead symbols for its tagging-schema icons, and OpenTrailMap retired its own custom set once Pinhead covered the same ground. The project also polices itself: a validation script rejects any submitted graphic that uses a stroke, a transform, or an attribute outside an approved list, forcing every contributor's work through the same narrow shape before it ships. That kind of enforced consistency is rare in a community-built set, where drift between contributors is the usual failure mode.

What's good

The fifteen-pixel legibility target forces real craft: every graphic has to read clearly at the size an actual map pin renders, not just as an isolated dashboard image. Compound names are parsed automatically into a category tree, so a graphic combining two ideas, say a car paired with a wrench, groups sensibly with other repair-related symbols without anyone hand-building a taxonomy. It also reconciles graphics pulled from a dozen separate public domain projects into one consistent visual language, sparing a mapmaker from hunting across sources for whichever set happens to have the shape they need.

Tradeoffs

The category system infers groupings from filenames through a fairly intricate set of pattern rules, which is clever but also opaque: it is not obvious which words trigger a match, and a wrong one changes how a symbol surfaces with no explicit index for outsiders to check. Assembling the library depends on network access to a dozen upstream repositories at build time, cloning each fresh, so it inherits any outage or history rewrite on their end. The tool that syncs approved symbols to Wikimedia Commons also still authenticates with a plain username and password rather than a token, a dated pattern for an otherwise active pipeline.

How to use it well

This fits a web map or desktop GIS project that needs point marker graphics, not a general app icon set: everything here is tuned for a marker's tiny footprint, not a toolbar button. Pull the published package for programmatic access to individual graphics, or grab the generated font when a mapping library already renders labels through a font layer. Check the published coverage comparison before adding a duplicate marker of your own, since the project already tracks overlap against the sources it draws from. Anyone contributing a new symbol should read the design guidelines first, since the automated check rejects anything outside the required single-path, stroke-free format.

Observed

License

CC0-1.0 (LICENSE file, and the license field in package.json).

Language

JavaScript, distributed as an ECMAScript module (type: module in package.json).

Packaging

published npm package plus a separately generated icon font (built via svg2ttf and svgicons2svgfont) and static JSON manifests.

Interfaces

no CLI or API; consumed as raw SVG files, a webfont, or JSON manifest data.

Structural

the build clones upstream icon-source repositories from metadata/external_sources.json at build time rather than vendoring them in the repo.

Structural

scripts/check_icons.js enforces a fixed viewBox, single-path output, and forbids stroke or transform attributes on every icon before build.

Funding

GitHub Sponsors and Ko-Fi links declared in package.json, both pointing to a single maintainer account.