Being part of the jury in the recent Internetics web design competition, I noticed on the competitor's side a lot of self-indulgence when it comes to icons. Well, to put it in the correct perspective, a lot of self-indulgence regarding typography and icons. But the lack of love for typography many web designers display (hey, I found among submissions even a site with copy set in Comic Sans!) is beside the subject.

Back to icons. Enter Row London:

« I started gathering little, iconesque web images for myself so that I could compare, contrast, and study the techniques used by other graphic artists on the web. My initial pool of images looked so interesting that I decided to continue methodically hunting and capturing the icons for a public display piece. [...]

I roughly estimate that for every six web sites I scoured, I was able to acquire one graphic image. I visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, I have this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display. »

300 Images From 1800 Sites: organized in groups -- arrows, posts, comments, mail, bullets, print, and carts & bags -- they are an interesting study of this kind of functional graphics.