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In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible. With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.

In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.

Behance

The Behance API is an API with various design data that we can use.

We can access it with an API key.

We can use its endpoints to get projects, users, creative fields, and collections.

It comes with a JS wrapper, PHP library, a Ruby package, and a Python package.

Cooper Hewitt

The Cooper Hewitt API returns the data stored in the Smithsonian Design Museum.

To access it, we need to acquire an API token.

Once we created an API key, we can get various kinds of data like colors, departments, shop items, brands, videos, visitor data, and more.

Also, we can get gallery data like opening hours and whether the museum is open or not.

We can also get data for specific rooms.

Images are also available for retrieval.

Dribbble

The Dribbble API is another API that lets us designer data.

We need to authenticate with OAuth before we can access its data.

Data that we can get include projects, shots, users, and jobs.

The data can be read and manipulated with the endpoints.

Harvard Art Museums

The Harvard Art Museums API lets us access data provided by the museum.

To access the API, we need to create an API key.

We can access many kinds of data with this API.

We can access person, exhibitions,m publication, gallery, and activity data.

Also, we can get art created by a given technique.

Images, audio, and video are also available with this API.

We can explore the museum by getting data from this API with the Museum Explorer.

The Art Explorer lets us browse through collections with this API.

This API can be used from the browser directly and also from the server-side.

There are examples of how to access this API in the documentation. 

Iconfinder

The Iconfinder API is a JSON API that lets us access resources on the service, like icons, icon sets, categories, styles, authors, etc.

An API key is required to access this API.

We can get icon set details, icon author data, icons by categories, icon styles, and more with this API.

Icon license information is also available for icons.

Icons8

The Icons8 API is another API that lets us access icon data.

This API has fewer endpoints than the Iconfinder API.

We can use it to search for data, metadata, and web fonts.

Authentication is done by OAuth.

HTTPS is available with this API.

Noun Project API

The Noun Project API lets us access icon data.

We can access them by their collection or access individual icon data.

Fields returned include URL, author, name, and more.

OAuth authentication is required to access this API.

Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum API lets us access data from the Rijksmuseum.

We can access painting data from this API.

An API key is required to access the API.

We can access object metadata, bibliographic metadata, and user-generated content with this API.

Conclusion

There are many useful APIs to access arts data.