I definitely have a love-hate relationship with icons. It reminds me of the days in the nineties when I had five million fonts (thank you, USENET) and nowhere to put them. Now, of course, I've learned that less is more; my font collection is much smaller and yet far more useful. I have adopted the same philosophy with icons; however, I still have many icon packs I can turn to when the need arises.

For the purposes of this series, I've defined "small" as 16×16 or smaller; some icon sets have a few members that break this rule, but the bulk of their icons are small enough for my purposes.

Fugue Icons by Yusuke Kamiyamane

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

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Yusuke Kamiyamane's Fugue icon set now has 3,000 icons for your enjoyment. The icons come in shadowless and shadowed versions. An optional download file includes the PSD source for each icon.

Diagona Icons by Yusuke Kamiyamane

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

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Yusuke Kamiyamane's Diagona icon set has 400 icons: 200 are 10×10, 200 are 16×16.

Farm-Fresh Web Icons by FatCow Web Hosting

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States

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1,400 icons from FatCow Web Hosting come in both 16×16 and 32×32. Preview images include only the 16×16 icons for comparison. Most are filetype, device, and application-related, but there are also social mini-icons scattered throughout. (Someone at FatCow must like Linux.)

LED Icons by Aleksandr Kozmenko

License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

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Aleksandr Kozmenko designed these 513 icons for web designers and developers. Most are filetype, device, and application-related, but check out the sports and weather icons as well.

Splashy Icons by Dat Nguyen

License: "Enjoy. Let me know if it's useful to you."

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These 483 icons by Dat Nguyen are vibrant and colorful. Most are filetype and application-related. Check out the goldfish cracker!