A new and upcoming graphics design initiative called “The Noun Project” is going to make a lot of Windows Phone 7 designers and developers very happy.

The project’s mission is to collect, organize and make available an extensive library of free pictograms/icons for common nouns and concepts that make up the universal visual language, which also happens to be a major theme in Microsoft’s Metro design style. The best part, all icons are guaranteed to be free.

Still in it’s early stages, the website currently offers a solid set of 500+ icons. Unfortunately searching and categories are still being developed so it makes finding icons somewhat difficult in the meantime, but nevertheless fun to browse.

Microsoft is pretty committed to the consistent look and feel of Windows Phone 7, going so far as to releasing a huge 69 page Design and Interaction Guide.  To make it even easier for developers to maintain a consistent look and feel they have now released a 64 icon application bar icon set.

The package contains a set of 64 app bar icons in PNG format (32 dark and 32 light), and also contains vector versions that can be easily imported into Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Beta when using the Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone.

For more information on how to use these icons within your application, see How to: Add an Application Bar to Your Application on MSDN.

The Icon set can be downloaded here.

Via the WindowsTeamBlog.