Why I love Font Awsome

On Saturday, February, 7th, 2015 in Featured

So in early 2014 I decided to really focus on creating an online portfolio website, and while working with an IOS developer I was pointed into the direction of Font Awesome via twitter bootstrap.

I think the concept of icon fonts are brilliant for UX designers.

Before Font Awesome

When I first started wire-framing I was guilty of not knowing my limits and I would quite often design a lot of elements. This is something I still do but I have done my best to limit it as best as I can.

One thing that I have been impressed with is when I include icons, they seem to go down very well with clients and with users. They seem to understand information when it is supported in a pictorial form.

My favourite icon resources prior to Font Awesome were :

• Icon Finder
• Icons DB
• The Noun Project

These are a great resources for icons, but I find them limited because :

• Too much choice means I spend a lot of time using inconsistently design icons
• Time is spent looking through their icon libraries
• Re-colouring is not as efficient as it could be
• Sizing and positioning the icons can be a fiddly process
• Quite often the icons degrade if you re-size them

But with Font Awesome

I’ve found that font awesome helps to alleviate some of these problems, with the major benefit being an increase in my productivity.

Essentially Font Awesome works like any font. You can change the size and colour the same way you would a headling or paragraph.

Because the icons are vectorised as a font, they do not degrade or become pixelated if you change their size, so the font will always remain crisp.

Perhaps one of the drawbacks with Font Awesome is that you are then limited to a particular icon set, but to be honest it’s not too much of a worry because the suite receives regular updates, and because I often find myself re-using work I tend to use the same icons over and over.

Something I would like to see more of

At the moment there are a few Omnifraffle stencils and Axure libraries that are knocking around, but alas the people who support these don’t keep them up to date as much as they should do. To be honest they were probably created during some down time.

But in the meantime there is a great resource called the font awesome cheat sheet  to copy and paste the icon you should need, or just to stay up to date with the latest Font Awesome release.