Cynical?

What better way to show your skills to people who would contract you than to point at something as popular as his icon set?

I meant it jokingly. It's a brilliant advertisement, to be sure; I think that most people just see things like that as done strictly out of the goodness of people's hearts, and while that may often be true, I usually am inclined to believe the more self-serving aspect of it.

Not that there's anything wrong with it whatsoever.

How do you mean? His site hasn't been updated for 4 years. I don't know anything about the author.

This is the author: http://twitter.com/markjames

I wish I had been foresighted enough to realise that the icons were more than the occasionally useful result of a period of insomnia. The set was started because I could not find a good icon set to use in a system I was developing.

I have done almost no icon design since this set was released; The icons have garnered me some personal infamy, and I make a little from text link ads, but I would kill the site if not for the fact that people still appear to find the icons useful and reliable.

For personal work, I use the fugue set linked previously.