Font Awesome : All Web-Related Icons In Single Webfont Collection
One of the most popular trends at the moment in the field of web design is the use of font sets to embed icons into pages. Ironically, the explosion in creativity we’ve seen lately when it comes to user interfaces comes at a time when standardization and uniformity are strengthening as far as front-end tools are concerned. A good example of this is the Foundation Icon font set from Zurb. Icon fonts are steadily gaining popularity among amateur and professional designers for a number of reasons. Font Awesome is the latest font icon set that aims to streamline web design on every platform.
Due to its open source nature, Font Awesome is free to deploy commercially for any website. Originally created for use with Bootstrap from Twitter, it’s caught on in a major way for websites of all kinds. For everything from blogs to mobile apps, Font Awesome is the perfect way to embed vector graphics icons in any web page. Featuring cross-browser support and compatibility with all manner of screen readers, Font Awesome is the wave of the future right now for intuitive UI and web design. The 150+ included icons are clean and attractive, which makes them easy to integrate them into any design.
The great thing about font icons, aside from scalability and maintainability, is the fact that they’re so easy to implement. If you’ve used @font-face to implement custom fonts, you already know everything you need to start using Font Awesome in your projects. It’s a pretty simple process. Just download the ZIP file and copy it to your project’s root directory. Then link to either the
font-awesome.less
or
font-awesome.css
file in your head section. Once you’ve linked to those files properly, it’s merely a matter of applying the right class attribute to elements to embed fonts.
Mobile websites are the perfect environment in which to use Font Awesome, though it can be integrated into any web page. As it was designed at the outset to complement the Bootstrap front-end framework, some of the best examples of Font Awesome in action can be found on Bootstrap’s example and demo page. There are plenty of ingenious ways to style font icons to suit your needs aside from just embedding them and sizing them appropriately to fit into your design. Considering its standardization and flexibility, there’s really no reason why you can’t use Font Awesome in any design scenario.
Font Awesome should be given some sort of award for truth in advertising. The name pretty much sums up what it delivers to designers looking for an amazing icon font for all seasons. While there are many alternatives on the market, Font Awesome remains one of the top icon fonts to beat when it comes to sculpting slick user interfaces and simplifying front-end development. As mentioned previously, it’s free to use for commercial projects, so you don’t have to worry about rights issues. Just embed the font set, style your elements however you see fit and it’s off the races with Font Awesome.
