Pictos Icon Font Server • Hacker News Board

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#11

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:50 AM UTC

teeny wrote: post #4

It's a cool idea; but why they are using a png sprite for the icons on their own site?

Ya good question :) I built the marketing site before the service was finished. I wanted to launch quickly, so decided to use images instead of the font so I could focus on getting the app finished. Also, I sell the icons as PNGs and vectors, so it's showing customers that as well. Thanks!!

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#12

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:51 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #2

Using a font to provide icons on your website. It appears that the Pictos way is a font-replacement method using js? My first thought is that this should be relatively easy to replicate using http://thenounproject.com (or similar) as the source of the icons. I like the idea: kind of an extension of sprites to using the font file as the sprite holder; not sure if that's any more efficient though due to the cross-brows…

Nope :) There is no JS involved. Its a straight CSS file. Browser detection is done on the server by checking the headers. it's lightning fast :)

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#13

Post by notatoad » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:52 AM UTC

Am I wrong, or is this a terrible rip off? Anybody who has the need for this should be able to host a single $19 file on their site for minimal cost.

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#14

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:52 AM UTC

jakozaur wrote: post #6

The client list seems to be impressive, but I haven't seen those icons on any mentioned customer... is it true at all?

Yes it's very true. All the customers in that list are people who have purchased my icon sets. Some of them use then in internal tools, some use them for their public website or mobile apps. Thanks!

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#15

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:52 AM UTC

blakeperdue wrote: post #5

teeny wrote: post #4

It's a cool idea; but why they are using a png sprite for the icons on their own site?

Yeah, very strange that they wouldn't want to show off their product by actually using on their site.

If you click the "See Examples" button, you can view the font being used. Thanks!!

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#16

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 3:55 AM UTC

resnamen wrote: post #9

What are the advantages in using a remote service for this vs. hosting them yourself? I'm somewhat averse to taking out additional dependencies on other services if no compelling reason exists.

Everything is cached and served very quickly. The main advantage is you can change the icons on the fly at no additional cost. If you update your interface, add new icons or remove some, you can make those changes in that app and you don't even need to grab a new code snippet.

If you want to serve them yourself, that option is there as well. Thanks!!

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#17

Post by cleverjake » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 4:00 AM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #13

Am I wrong, or is this a terrible rip off? Anybody who has the need for this should be able to host a single $19 file on their site for minimal cost.

if you only want two files of the entire set, its better for your bandwidth and the clients speed to have a custom font that only includes those two icons. It is fairly trivial with fontforge, but a lot of people don't have the time and/or ability to do it.

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#18

Post by ned » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

Interesting service, and very well executed.

The one problem that I have with pictograms-as-fonts is anti-aliasing. The designers that I work with spend hours to make their icons absolutely perfect at every pixel size that they'll be displayed at. This is particularly visible when the icon has horizontal or vertical lines. Most of the time you'll want them have a hard edge, and with anti-aliasing you can never be sure you'll get that result.

This will change in a few years when all our screens have high pixel densities, but for the time being I'm sticking with PNG sprites, with hand-tweeked pixels.

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#19

Post by armandososa » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 6:01 AM UTC

This is a great idea. I already bought Pictos icons and fonts twice (for personal use, and for my day work) and I always thought that it would be nice to be able to have a tool that allow me to use a subset only.

Re: Pictos Icon Font Server

#20

Post by drewwilson » Sat, Jan 21, 2012, 6:11 AM UTC

ned wrote: post #18

Interesting service, and very well executed. The one problem that I have with pictograms-as-fonts is anti-aliasing. The designers that I work with spend hours to make their icons absolutely perfect at every pixel size that they'll be displayed at. This is particularly visible when the icon has horizontal or vertical lines. Most of the time you'll want them have a hard edge, and with anti-aliasing you can never be sur…

You can use this CSS rule to make them look like Photoshop:

-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

only works in webkit, which is most all mobile and chrome/safari.