Alternative to MDI icons

The Material Design Icons are pretty comprehensive and well-integrated into HA. But they’re a little dry, since they’re monochrome.

If you’re willing to put in the work, check out https://www.flaticon.com - they’ve got zillions of icons in a huge variety of styles. What’s nice is you can add icons you like to a “collection” and then download them all at once in a zip file. Yes, there are premium icons, but more than enough freebies to get your cards looking great. You can search just like on MDI. You can pick icons that are all part of a matching set, or just pick individual ones that you like.

You’re supposed to credit the artist(s) when using these, but since our HA layouts rarely leave our home computers, I’m not sure how to do that. Maybe an ATTRIBUTIONS.txt file would suffice if you’re going to post your config for others.

For example, I’m working on a sunrise/sunset display. Searching for “sunset” gives me these:

and a zillion more.

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think anywhere you can put in an icon: tag, you can use an image: tag instead. I’m working on a remote control component (I’ll post it when it’s finished and working), but I’m considering using a variety of these icons instead of just MDI icons. I’ve got all my downloaded .png icons in my www/mdi-remote/, so I then refer to them in Lovelace code as /local/mdi-remote/xxx.png

It’s more work for sure, but you can easily jazz up your displays by using these.

For reference, an MDI icon is 24x24px, and that’s one of the options at which you can download FlatIcon icons. Easy to mix and match if you wish.

I’m taking a break from coding Harmony scripts and thought I’d share this.

Maybe somebody will find it useful.

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Here’s my remote card, built with icons from FlatIcon.
Screenshot_20181111_062010

I nabbed the layout and general concept from https://sharethelove.io/vertical-stack-cards/av-remote but rearranged things to my liking.

I didn’t take any special care in finding icons that all match a certain style - there are thousands. I also bumped the size up to 32px (from 24px) to make the custom channel icons in the bottom row more readable.

All the buttons don’t work yet, and there’s a possibility some might never will. My TCL Roku tv doesn’t seem to accept user-added channels like Emby and YouTube. It’s got built-in support for Netflix and Amazon, so those work great. I’ve got work to do on the “common” buttons like the arrows and play/pause. I’ve got to send a device to Harmony, based on which activity is currently active - if it’s a TCL Roku activity, send the commands there. If it’s a regular TV activity, send them to my DVR. I’ve seen examples, it’s just not done yet.

Curiously, when no activity is running (entire system off), HA desaturates all the colors to shades of grey:

Screenshot_20181111_062118

I think it’s because the Harmony remote gets toggled to “off”. I’m not thrilled with this, but it’s not a priority.

So there’s what you can do using external icons. .Hope it’s useful to someone.

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I should note that the 32px icons are pretty tight together on the iPhone HA app.

Since some of the direct-Roku buttons don’t work, I might see about cutting it down to 5 columns instead of 6.

Can you share a snippet of your configuration? I’ve tried to use the image: tag in a glance card, but I’m not able to get it to work, so I’m curious to see how yours is setup. Thanks!

I started to do this but with icons from icons8.

Found that you can’t have an on and off icon that way.

I created some picture element cards that mimicked the entity card and used state image and state filters for on and off images

can you elaborate on how to use them in lovelace?

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