Fontlab studio creating a font fontcreater

ThereРІР‚в„ўs plenty of in-depth information about the use cases of icon fonts, including Ian FeatherРІР‚в„ўs Article, CSS-tricks, SitePoint, and Ben Frain.

Unfortunately, there is no good fallback until the icon font has been fully loaded, which makes it unavoidable to load assets before rendering the above-the-fold content (which has an impact on your Page Speed results). Positioning a tiny icon in the center of a circle so it looks the same in every browser can be painful and you should avoid overlaying multiple glyphs. Another disadvantage, which is also related to inconsistent rendering, is positioning. Due to differences across browsers, rendering and font smoothing can be unreliable. To be clear, there are some disadvantages. Icon fonts load faster than background or inline SVGРІР‚в„ўs ( see this experiment).

You can use the same icon in different sizes and colors to save time and space.

ItРІР‚в„ўs easy to apply CSS properties without editing the icon itself (color, gradient, shadows, etc.).

ThereРІР‚в„ўs no need to worry about Retina displays.

Icons are scalable without loss in definition.

Implementing icons as a web font has many advantages: The Basics of Icon FontsР”Вisplaying icons through fonts is no different than using alternative fonts for headers, titles, and paragraphs. Using non-standard fonts has become the standard in web development in recent years, leading to the rise of icon fonts. The dark ages, when web designers could only choose from a handful of different fonts, are (thankfully) over. This includes, to name a few: Importing bitmap image files (usually transparent PNGs), vectoring SVG files, or even using web fonts containing symbols instead of typical characters from the alphabet. In the history of the web, designers have tried a variety of methods to use icons and images on websites.

Fontlab studio creating a font fontcreater