30+ Innovative Icon-Based Navigation Menus

Here at Design Shack we love a good navigation menu. Lately we’ve noticed a trend arising around menus that use icons either exclusively in place of text or as a support of additional textual information.

Adding icons to your navigation can not only give you an aesthetic boost but actually make for a quicker visual read of the link. Here’s a collection of over thirty icon-based navigation menus that we found online. We’ll conclude with a few resources you can use to snag some free icons to create your own fancy menus.

The Menus

David Jonnson

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KK Media

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Bite Club

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Mac Rabbit

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Toffeenut Design

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Listal

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Narwhal Company

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Pixel Resort

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Fishing Cactus

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Tutorial 9

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Envira Media

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Duarte Pires

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Weblifting

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We Graphics

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Nando

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Inset

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Yanis Markin

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Steven Little Design

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Daniel Marques

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Axel Sears

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CV Studio

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The Peach Design

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Genocom

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Michael Hogenmiller

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Rather Splendid

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Eichi Creative Design

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Dan Wiersema

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Music Thoughts

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Fresh

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Dishizzle

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Lelegins

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Boxee

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Tripping Words

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Free Icon Sets

Now that you’ve had your dose of inspiration, it’s time to start the original creation step. Use the resources below to help you create your own beautiful navigation menu!

gCons: Free All-Purpose Icons for Designers and Developers (100 icons + PSD)

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478 Free SVG Vector Icons – The “Seven” Icon Pack

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Icons: Free iPhone Toolbar Icons

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iPhone Toolbar Icon Set

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Freebie: 20 High Quality 3D Icons

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NIXUS Icon Pack: 60 Beautiful Premium Icons (Free)

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WooFunction: 178 Amazing Web Design Icons

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Colorful Stickers Icon Set :: 20 Icons

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Designer Icons – Professionally Hand-Crafted Free Icon Set

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Default Icon

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Icon Search Engines

Looking for something specific? Check out these great free icon search engines.

Icon Finder

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Icon Seeker

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Iconlet

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Conclusion

With the inspiration and resources above, you should now be fully armed to go out and make some great icon-based navigation menus.

Also, be sure to leave a link to any icon-based navigation menus that you’ve found on the web.