A Better Way to Use Icons on Your Website

Have you ever noticed how some icons on websites can take a long time to load? It’s because they are often made up of large image files that slow down your site. Plus, when you zoom in or view them on high-resolution screens, they can look blurry.

But there is a better solution: icon fonts. These are special fonts that contain icons instead of letters. They are smaller in size, load faster, and look sharp no matter what size or screen you view them on.

Why Icon Fonts Are the Way to Go

An icon font is like a special package of icons that you can use on your website. It’s pretty cool because it’s actually a font file that you can add to your site. This means you can use it just like you would use any other font, but instead of letters and numbers, it’s filled with icons!

There are a few reasons why icon fonts are awesome. First, they look really sharp and clear on any screen. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at a tiny phone screen or a big high-resolution monitor, the icons will always be nice and clear.

Another great thing about icon fonts is that you can make them bigger or smaller without losing any quality. So if you want a really big icon or a really tiny one, you can do that and it will still look great.

But the best part is that you can customize icon fonts just like you would with regular text. You can change the color, make them transparent, add shadows, and even animate them! It’s a super easy way to make your website look fancy and fun.

So, if you want to add some awesome icons to your website and make it look even cooler, you should definitely check out icon fonts. They’re easy to use, flexible, and they’ll make your site stand out from the rest.

The use of @font-face for icon fonts is supported by many browsers, including older ones like Internet Explorer 4 (with .eot). This means that you can use icon fonts without any problems.

Using icon fonts has several benefits. One of them is that it reduces the number of HTTP requests your website makes, which can speed up loading times. Additionally, icon fonts typically have a smaller file size compared to traditional image-based icons, further optimizing your website’s performance.

If you’re looking for some top free icon fonts to use, here are a few options:

– Font Awesome

– Ionicons

– Material Design Icons

– Feather Icons

Before embedding any icon font into your website, make sure to review and adhere to the licensing terms. It’s important to respect the efforts and work of the creators by following their guidelines.

Now, let’s talk about how to implement the @font-face rule, which is used to embed icon fonts in web pages. This rule allows us to define a new font family. Let me provide an example using the ‘Web Symbols’ font:

“`css

@font-face {

font-family: ‘Web Symbols’;

src: url(‘web-symbols.eot’);

src: url(‘web-symbols.eot?#iefix’) format(’embedded-opentype’),

url(‘web-symbols.woff’) format(‘woff’),

url(‘web-symbols.ttf’) format(‘truetype’),

url(‘web-symbols.svg#websymbolsregular’) format(‘svg’);

}

“`

By including this CSS code in your stylesheet, you’ll be able to use the ‘Web Symbols’ font throughout your website.

In my HTML document, I can use special characters to display icons. To do this, I assign a specific class to the elements that I want to have icons. So, for example, if I want to add an icon to a paragraph, I can give it a class like “icon-font”. Then, in my CSS, I can define the font-family for that class to be the one that includes the icons. This way, when the browser renders the page, it will display the icons instead of the regular text. Another option is to use pseudo-elements. These are like virtual elements that we can create with CSS. We can attach icons to these pseudo-elements, which are attached to the existing HTML elements. This lets us add icons without modifying the HTML structure.

In CSS, we can make our list even more interesting by adding icons before each item using pseudo-elements. Take a look at this code:

“`html

font-family: WebSymbolsRegular;

margin-right: 5px;

content: “h”;

content: “i”;

content: “j”;

content: “A”;

content: “B”;

“`

Now let’s talk about an interesting concept called Unicode Private Use. Instead of using standard characters like A, B, C, and D, we can embed icons in Unicode Private Use Areas. This helps to avoid any conflicts between characters. Tools like FontAwesome use this method.

Check out this example code:

“`html

.icon-glass:before {

content: “\f000”;

}

“`

By adding icons using Unicode Private Use, we can create unique and visually appealing designs for our websites.

If you want to add the icon directly to your HTML code, you can’t use the code \f0c6 because it’s not a valid HTML character code.

HTML needs a special markup called numerical reference to display special characters. This markup consists of an ampersand ( & ), followed by a hash ( # ), the hexadecimal number representing the character, and an x . For example, f0c6 becomes  in HTML. In FontAwesome, this code shows a paper clip icon like this:

Reducing the Size of Your Font with Subsetting

Did you know that you can make your font file smaller by eliminating unused characters? It’s true! And one handy tool that can help you with this is FontSquirrel’s @font-face generator.

Here’s how it works: simply visit the generator and upload your font. Then, select the “Expert” option and click on “Custom Subsetting” for even more choices.

Let’s say I want to use the super cool Sociolico font for my website’s social media icons. I only want the icons for Dribble, Facebook, and Twitter, which are represented by the letters d, f, and t. To do this, I simply enter these characters in the “Single Characters” field, like this:

Hey there! Guess what? Now you can totally download this font. It’s super small, only about 3Kb to 5Kb in size. But here’s the catch: only the letters d, f,, and t will show up as icons. Everything else will just look like regular old letters.

Here’s something to think about

Okay, so maybe you can’t make crazy fancy icons with this method. But what you can get is a flexible, scalable, retina-ready solution that won’t hog up a bunch of space on your computer. If you’re cool with sacrificing some fancy details, this method is totally worth the switch.

If you’re itching to explore this cool icon-serving method even more, we’ve got some rad resources for you. Check out the links below for more info, plus you can also snag our demo and source code for download.

• How to Make Your Own Icon Webfont – WebDesignerDepot.com
• Displaying Fonts and Data Attributes – 24Ways
• Private Use Unicode – Wikipedia