Icon fonts offer UI designers a straightforward way to incorporate glyphs, symbols, or pictograms into their projects, replacing traditional letters and numbers with visual representations.
Beyond scalability, icon fonts are also fully customizable. You have complete control over their appearance, allowing you to easily adjust their size and edit colors to perfectly align with the aesthetic of your UI design. This flexibility empowers designers to maintain a consistent and polished look throughout their projects.
Adding icon fonts to your web or mobile app projects is a breeze with CSS. You just load the font file using @font-face, and then you can easily customize its appearance using standard CSS rules. This means you can adjust properties like font-size, color, padding, margin, and more to perfectly fit your design.
While widely used, icon fonts do come with drawbacks. For instance, Ian Feather explained his decision to switch from icon fonts to SVGs, and CSS-Tricks has also weighed in on the considerations between icon fonts and SVG icons. Both sources ultimately favor SVG.
However, it’s worth noting that Pictonic has presented a counter-argument, claiming icon fonts can be 10% faster than SVG. Ultimately, these are all important factors to consider when deciding whether to utilize icon fonts in your project.
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Material Design Iconic Font
CSSans Pro CSS Font
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Socialicious Social Media Icon Library
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About Author
Eyden Haze
Eyden Haze is a digital marketer, a web designer and technology fanatic from Sydney, Australia. With over 7 years of experience in web industry, he has helped his clients to launch their marketing campaigns successfully. He also likes to explore various online tools and share that knowledge by writing useful blog posts.