bitwix

Tangential comments about Software Development

Friday, January 31, 2014

The promise of icon fonts

Spyros, my web designer, gets a bit sick of me liking a graphic and immediately asking to have it in four colours and two sizes.

So we've gone over to putting the graphics into icon font files. I'd been using Font Awesome http://fontawesome.io/ for a while, and Spyros found Fontello http://fontello.com/ as a free way of converting SVG into a font.

I've implemented our forthcoming Debtograph look using this technique, with a single font file (8k for the .ttf) and a few lines of CSS.


A couple of caveats so far. Sometimes a line width does not get rendered neatly. Adding one into a set of navigation bar PNG buttons is proving tricky to align correctly. But these are niggles.

If you like single colour graphics made with clear lines, icon fonts looks like the way to go.