Font Awesome Explained
What is Font Awesome?
Font Awesome Explained
Simply put, Font Awesome is a range of 'Icon Fonts' - a standard set of Icons for use in
your website content. It's designed to be fully compatable with Twitter Bootstrap and has a great WordPress plugin. It can also be fully customised with CSS – size, colour, drop shadow etc... giving a range of simple icons rather than having to use photos. And best of all – as an Open Source program it's completely free for commercial use!
Why should I use it?
Trying to balance the file sizes of images while building a web page is a well-known nightmare, needing to be called up to the page using HTML markup and losing their definition when trying to resize them. With high-resolution screens now becoming the norm, this can easily lead to a sloppy looking webpage because a regular image will only resolve as you want it when used in its original dimensions.
For the more standard images – vehicles, punctuation characters, graphical charting icons etc... - Icon Fonts like Font Awesome can give you easily scalable and customisable icons, giving your page a more pleasing aesthetic without the hassle of images. Just as the clarity of letters and numbers stay the same at size 8, 12 or 24 point font size, so too can you now use icons that will remain clear no matter the size. They can even be linked to carry out specific functions.
Sounds great! Any downsides?
While there are several common problems reported by users of Icon Fonts although they don't tend to apply to Font Awesome (cause it's awesome, obviously). Firstly is a potential issue with screen readers that may read aloud the icon as an alphanumeric character. However, due to the way the Font Awesome retrieves its characters this is not a problem. In addition, Icon Fonts are usually only availble in a single colour or in the CSS3 gradients - giving less choice.
It can also be extremely time consuming to create custom fonts to suit yoru needs – even with Font Awesome. However, with an already substantial library of icons available that is continuously being expanded.
Summary
This is probably one of the best set of Icon Fonts available and can be adapted for use in regular websites. If you use Icons already or are thinking of giving them a go then Font Awesome may be quite a nice surprise.
