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Icons – Google Fonts

fonts.google.com

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21–30 of 190 posts

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#21

Post by jfoster »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #16
throwaway3699 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

I don’t care since the icon font approach is technically inferior to SVG icons: it’s monochrome only, whereas SVG supports colors and transparency. Icon fonts also suffer from a plethora of rendering issues across platforms because fonts are usually rendered with speedy display of long text in mind. It’s strange Google would invest in a years-old kludge tech.

Well, it's a good thing it's under Apache 2.0, then. Maybe someone will convert/trace them as SVGs and sublicense them...

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#22

Post by michelb »

paul_f wrote: post #6
wodenokoto wrote: post #5

So now users need to download several megabytes of font to display check marks and search icons or is there something I’m misunderstanding?

It is a 42KB file for 600 icons.

I would have expected it to work like the fonts, where you only query the things you need, and not everything. For performance reasons I assume people would still make a custom font/SVG set with only the icons they need.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#23

Post by petters »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #14

Regular reminder that icon fonts are bad for accessibility and are technically troublesome also in other ways: https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/

When developing, the fact that icon fonts follow the size and color of the surrounding text is nice, though. E.g. when tweaking the text color of a button.

At least in my limited frontend experience.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#24

Post by DangerousPie »

petters wrote: post #23
TonyTrapp wrote: post #14

Regular reminder that icon fonts are bad for accessibility and are technically troublesome also in other ways: https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/

When developing, the fact that icon fonts follow the size and color of the surrounding text is nice, though. E.g. when tweaking the text color of a button. At least in my limited frontend experience.

SVGs can do the same thing.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#25

Post by jfk13 »

I see they promote the ligature approach:

    face
where the font is expected to ligate the characters 'f', 'a', 'c', 'e' into a single glyph.

This can be problematic on the web, as it means that if a user doesn't get your webfont for any reason (download failed, browser settings that disable webfonts, accessibility options that override fonts for clarity, etc) the entire word will appear in a fallback font, often totally disrupting the layout. (Can your site adapt nicely to a word, or even an entire phrase -- e.g. "format list bulleted" -- appearing in the toolbar where you expected a single icon?)

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#26

Post by jfoster »

ilogik wrote: post #17
throwaway3699 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

y...yes? they should use an appropriate license

It's incredible that one of the biggest companies in the world can't manage to appropriately license their stuff.

Apache 2.0 is also a strange license for anything that's not code, too; it refers to "source" and "object" form throughout. I imagine they could've chosen it for license simplicity & compatibility reasons, but again, if they just wanted these to be used as widely as possible, they could've just gone CC0.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#27

Post by echelon »

Neat.

I've got a wild idea.

What if instead of trying to destroy the web [1], Google tried to become the very best company for web developers? You know, take a play from Microsoft's "Developers Developers Developers" playbook after it was handed off to Nadella. The hip Microsoft that built VSCode, bought Github, and has the #2 cloud.

Maybe a first class web has "native apps" that work on desktop and Android and don't require an App Store. That might handicap their rival Apple, because writing for web once targets two of the biggest three platforms.

Get "distribution/promotion" through Search. Their ecosystem works, ties together, and makes sense.

If Web wins and Google is #1 at it, then nearly all of their foes lose power. They can sell tools, build a flywheel, moat, all in one. And they wouldn't even have to be assholes anymore. All the cool kids stop hating.

I don't expect their leadership to come up with this grand idea, however. We're just going to get more of the same. More wood behind all the arrows, none of which hit the target and all of which get cancelled in two to five years.

[1] (Chrome, AMP, killing adblock, knee-capping HTML5, ruining semantic standards, making search a hard problem)

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#28

Post by tobyhinloopen »

DangerousPie wrote: post #24
petters wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When developing, the fact that icon fonts follow the size and color of the surrounding text is nice, though. E.g. when tweaking the text color of a button. At least in my limited frontend experience.

SVGs can do the same thing.

That SVG does have to be inline though, which drastically increases your HTML page’s size. You cannot style an SVG loaded in an IMG element.

Imagine rendering 50 rows with each 6 icons, 1kb each. There are 6 unique icons, so it’s only 6kb each loading them from the server, but inline you’ll have 300kb of SVG icons

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#29

Post by throwaway3699 »

ilogik wrote: post #17
throwaway3699 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

y...yes? they should use an appropriate license

All Google is saying is don't scam others by reselling the same stuff that is freely available. Licensing it under something more restrictive (or custom) would make this a non-starter for other companies to reuse or remix.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#30

Post by DangerousPie »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #28
DangerousPie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SVGs can do the same thing.

That SVG does have to be inline though, which drastically increases your HTML page’s size. You cannot style an SVG loaded in an IMG element. Imagine rendering 50 rows with each 6 icons, 1kb each. There are 6 unique icons, so it’s only 6kb each loading them from the server, but inline you’ll have 300kb of SVG icons

You can use an "SVG sprite" with . No need to inline the SVG every time.
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