Good icons are hard to design. I have tried to design my own, and have used in-house graphics designers as well. However, building a good icon set takes a lot of work, even for the graphic designer.
I believe your best solution is to buy/find a set of icons for use in your projects.
The silk icon set is a good, free set and can be found at FamFamFam. There are over 1000 icons in this set, and it is very popular.
If you are looking for something "different", you can purchase icon sets for a couple hundred bucks. Considering the cost of having a designer create them for you, or doing them yourself, the cost of these sets is cheap!
Here's a few icon designers I've come across of the web:
- Icon Factory
- Icon Experience
- Icon Buffet
