The worst flag icons in the world...ever!
For reasons that will shortly become clear, I've been scouting around the internet for a set of small graphics to represent European flags. Of course I could make them myself, but I've no doubt somebody has already done that for me, and if I've learnt one thing from bad Perl scripting over the years, it is to look for prior art and shortcuts.
What I won't be using, is this set of flag favicons from ClickFire.
Note: since we used the standard of 16 colors, some of the flags may not be exactly the correct hue. Please do not be offended if not perfect. Thanks for understanding.
And with that slight understatement, the ClickFire site unleashes on an unsuspecting world the worst set of internet flag icons ever. They are so bad, I've even tried to check out if it is a spoof.
These world flag icons can be used to spruce up your web pages as favicons. The icons are in 16X16 and 16 colors. The icons are original work and free to download, use and modify any way you like.
...
Some of the countries' flags represented are Afghanistan, China, France, Germany, India, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Mexico, Spain, Taiwan and the United States. Please download/upload to your server instead of linking directly to the flag favicons. Patriots and website designers enjoy!
The thing is, I just can't help feeling that patriots in Uruguay won't be too enamoured of their newly purple flag. Or the Senegalese of their interesting brown, green and red ensemble. Or that Ukrainians will be bashing out websites dedicated to Euro2012, proudly boasting of their national colours of cyan and green...?
And only a cynic like me could wonder aloud how it is possible that the patriots behind these icons managed to render the blue in the stars'n'stripes of the USA as blue, whilst rendering the blue of the Russian flag as a rather fetching magenta instead.
The famfamfam icon set is pretty ubiquitous. It's used by Skype, as well as many websites:
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/
Thanks for that Matt, I had cobbled together a set of European ones, but they look much nicer.
And, looking at the screen-shot of the ones I was laughing at, I reckon the Union Jack is upside down as well, but it is hard to tell at that size ;-)
Was rushing to recommend http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ but I'm too late.
famfamfam icons also in use at the mighty fine www.mediauk.com incidentally... ;)
Wikimedia Commons has a complete set of national flags (including obscure countries like the United States Virgin Islands). They're in SVG format too, so should be scalable, but may not look their best in small icon sizes.
P.S I hope you're using the flags to represent countries, not languages.
Oh and the Famfamfam icons seem a bit shiny to me :-)
I was planning to divide the UK, US, Candaian, Australian and New Zealand flags into five slices and make a combined English language icon...
So where are your icons?
Instead of doing my own bad flag icons, I always use the famfamfam flag icons.