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Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

fortaweso.me

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Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#61

Post by hornbaker »

Brilliant. I absolutely love this, and will absolutely use Font Awesome in my next project.

While the name Font Awesome is catchy, it doesn't say much about the product, and won't carry seo juice or meaning for your main selling point: better icons. A name like "fonticons" (pronounced like "emoticons") might be stronger, and you could own that term which may go generic (like "kleenex") if the technique is widely adopted.

In fact, you could literally own it. After making sure a google search was relatively clean, and a USPTO.gov trademark search was clear, I just registered the domain fonticons.com, and would be happy to give it to you if you want it as a token of appreciation for your project.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#62

Post by taejo »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #56

Just wondering, is it possible to combine this with the font we use in the website so we don't need to download two separate fonts? Maybe some command line tool?

FontForge has a "Merge fonts" command. It's scriptable in Python, though that command doesn't seem to be part of the API. It would probably not be hard to implement the same functionality simply adding glyphs in a loop... or to add a function to the Python API.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#63

Post by taejo »

armandososa wrote: post #57
fortawesome wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Illustrator to make the vectors, copied directly into Fontographer, saved as TTF, then converted to webfont with Fontsquirrel.com.

Slightly offtopic, but why is Font making software so damn expensive? I'd love to help on this and other open source font efforts but there's no way I am buying $400 software. Corel Draw for windows has TTF exporting built-in. I think this should be an AI feature.

There is an open-source font-making program called FontForge. Some people complain about it but I've used it to make several fonts without too much difficulty (besides, of course, the inherent difficulty of designing a good typeface).

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#64

Post by hellweaver666 »

jazzdev wrote: post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

If you only need a low number of icons in a single size, then yes, bitmap icons are probably the way forward, but if you need lots of icons and you need them to be scaleable, then this is a great way to achieve it.

I wish someone would create a tool that lets you pick only the icons you want and compile a new minimal font with just what you need in it (in all the formats necessary for safe cross browser embedding).

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#65

Post by justincormack »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #64
jazzdev wrote: post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

If you only need a low number of icons in a single size, then yes, bitmap icons are probably the way forward, but if you need lots of icons and you need them to be scaleable, then this is a great way to achieve it. I wish someone would create a tool that lets you pick only the icons you want and compile a new minimal font with just what you need in it (in all the formats necessary for safe cross browser embedding).

I believe font squirrel http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ can do subsetting for you and then output all formats.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#66

Post by justincormack »

fortawesome wrote: post #44
dangrossman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Darn. It's a shame that the icons are the only part of Bootstrap not under the same license. I was hoping this font would change that, but it's going to remain a no-go for commercial sites and apps where the company isn't going to create a "credits" page just to link back to CC-BY licensed stuff. They'll just license Glyphicons instead. In fact, now I'm curious. You took the Glyphicons set and effectively copied it,…

I'm re-considering the license for the font itself. I agree, attribution on a commercial site would not be ideal. Attribution in code, however, seems reasonable. I used the classes from the Glyphicons set for backwards compatibility, but every icon was designed from scratch. If you look closely, you'll notice many of them are quite different.

Attribution in code is unworkable if you minify code as it will no longer be there. Coders who are looking that hard will be able to work out where the awsomeness came from. Embrace a sane open source license please, something that would eg allow distribution with Debian.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#67

Post by weixiyen »

hornbaker wrote: post #61

Brilliant. I absolutely love this, and will absolutely use Font Awesome in my next project. While the name Font Awesome is catchy, it doesn't say much about the product, and won't carry seo juice or meaning for your main selling point: better icons. A name like "fonticons" (pronounced like "emoticons") might be stronger, and you could own that term which may go generic (like "kleenex") if the technique is widely adop…

I agree, absolutely brilliant idea. You've essentially solved monochromatic image scaling in the web. I can't wait until genre-specific fonticons come out.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#68

Post by rubyron »

hornbaker wrote: post #61

Brilliant. I absolutely love this, and will absolutely use Font Awesome in my next project. While the name Font Awesome is catchy, it doesn't say much about the product, and won't carry seo juice or meaning for your main selling point: better icons. A name like "fonticons" (pronounced like "emoticons") might be stronger, and you could own that term which may go generic (like "kleenex") if the technique is widely adop…

For good measure, I just registered the twitter handle @fonticons, too, which of course you're welcome to have. My contact info is in my profile.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#70

Post by tintin »

jazzdev wrote: post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

✔ it's also good practice to check unicode first. Arrows for example are available in all shapes and directions. ➜ So if there is an icon available in unicode just use that one.
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