Not related to this specific set of icons (they look great)... but I'm really wondering when the pendulum is going to swing back from line art to actual colors and solids again.
I've found toolbars so much harder to read for the last decade than they were before, ever since flat design removed all color and solids and made everything look like squiggles of the same weight.
Toolbar icons used to be much more easily distinguishable by color and shape and weight and shading. [1] How long is the ultra-flat design trend going to last...?!
Is it a technological issue on the web at this point? Once we get complete browser support for color fonts [2], is that going to give us rich-color icon fonts? Because I just cannot wait.
Something that makes color icons harder to support is the presence of dark modes and sometimes choice of themes within light mode and dark mode. Where a single set of glyphic icons they can simply be tinted appropriately, but with full color icons you’ll need at minimum a base set for light mode and secondary subset with problematic icons adjusted to work under dark mode. It’s easy to solve from a technical perspective (in CSS there’s media queries, on Apple OSes Xcode has built in variant handling for images) but there’s still the extra overhead of creating the required resources.
That's true, but most sites don't support dark mode anyways, and it's still not clear that dark mode will be widely adopted web designers. In any case, you're right there would just be a second font file for dark mode, so at least a user wouldn't have to download both.
In any case, as of two months ago Chrome still explicitly has no plans to implement SVG in OpenType (despite support in every other major browser, and the request being 3 years old), so color icon fonts don't appear to be coming to the web as a whole anytime soon. :( [1]
I was using similar project 'feathericons'[1] in my website, but later went on to use just the requisite couple of svg's directly with href.
Reasons being,
1. JS, although OP project doesn't seem to need one.
2. Missing icons, e.g. Reddit was missing in feather icons.
3. Only few icons were utmost needed and that doesn't justify a library.
I think the real use case for such libraries are websites were there are user generated content and they are allowed use such icons; then again with emoji's I don't know how many prefer this. On second thought, themes for CMS may be the prominent use case.
Lovely icons, but I have been finding it so much simpler to just use unicode characters when I need icons. I can't always find exactly what I want, but I can usually get close enough and the simplicity is sublime.
Does anybody have some font suggestions for matching this style? My ideal would have the following:
1. Even line thickness within each character (this matches the icon style).
2. This is a tough one: looks good with the same line thickness at different font sizes (i.e. if you increase font size, you decrease font weight). This allows you to match the line thickness of your icons with the same font at different font sizes. I'm not opposed to using a variety of fonts for different sizes, but that of course means I have to find different fonts that fit my criteria.
3. Serif. This significantly improves character differentiation in my experience. It is arguably a departure from the flat style, but sans-serif fonts are both harder to read, and also stale IMO--too much of the internet is Helvetica/Arial.
4. Available on most machines. I don't necessary mean pre-loaded, but availability from CDNs and common enough to be likely already cached would be nice. However, given I can serve this up from a CDN or include in apps myself, this is probably the least important criteria.
The best I've found is Zilla Slab[1]. To me that looks great in the range of (weight:400, size: 24px) to (weight: 300, size: 40px), but smaller/larger than that, it becomes blurry/too "spindly", respectively on my screen. That's big enough for most applications, but for tooltips, icon labels, placeholders, etc. I'd like a smaller size.
One consideration here is that serifs just aren't visible at smaller sizes, so maybe I need to relax that requirement.
Why do you think Google hosts all these fonts for free? Nearly every webpage today has a request to fonts.googleapis.com. Most adblockers don't even blacklist it.
You don't need cookies to track user activity across the web. If Google is using Etags for example for handling the caching of their web fonts, and if the user doesn't have the referer headers disabled, then Google can see who is visiting which page and when. There are other ways to achieve this too
But only when the resource isn't cached, so it's not like they're getting notified anytime anyone opens any webpage. But they do get a heuristic measure of how much traffic is going to any webpage that loads a font from google.
Some common reasons include transferring less (data/bandwidth limitations) and reducing attack surface (fonts have historically been involved in a surprising number of vulnerabilities).
I've found toolbars so much harder to read for the last decade than they were before, ever since flat design removed all color and solids and made everything look like squiggles of the same weight.
Toolbar icons used to be much more easily distinguishable by color and shape and weight and shading. [1] How long is the ultra-flat design trend going to last...?!
Is it a technological issue on the web at this point? Once we get complete browser support for color fonts [2], is that going to give us rich-color icon fonts? Because I just cannot wait.
[1] http://www.mswordhelp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/toolbar...
[2] https://www.colorfonts.wtf/