A List Apart Issue № 371
This issue of A List Apart is a great double-whammy. Lara Swanson has a ton of practical tips for front-end performance enhancements, and Brian dives deep into making your own icon fonts.
Tags: icons
Asset Fonts
The slides from Josh’s super-quickfire presentation at the Responsive Day Out.
Sparkicons and the humble hyperlink by Mark Boulton
I really like Mark’s idea of standardised “sparkicons” …for a while there, reading this, I was worried he was going to propose something like Snap Preview. shudder
❍ IcoMoon
This is a great free service for generating small subsetted icon fonts. Launch the app and have a play around — you can choose from the icons provided or you can import your own SVG shapes.
Nice touch: you can get the resulting font (mapped to your choice of unicode characters) base-64 encoded for your stylesheet.
JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · Using Fonts for Resolution Independent Assets
Josh gives a blow-by-blow account of he created a custom icon font for an upcoming redesign of the Clearleft website: completely scalable and resolution-independent.
I truly believe it won’t be all that long until bitmap image formats will be the exception rather than the rule on the web.
Fontello - easy iconic fonts composer
A nifty service for creating a custom font with just the icons you need.
Symbolset
It’s really good to see more providers of icon font sets. These look very nicely designed indeed.
We need a standard show navigation icon for responsive web design | Stuff & Nonsense
Andy documents the kinds of symbols being used to represent revealable navigation on mobile.
Pictos
In an interesting new twist, Pictos now allows you to put together a custom subset of their icons as a font that can be served from their server just like any other webfont service.
The Icon Handbook | The Hickensian | Hicksdesign
Jon gives us a run-through on what to expect from his new book. I’ve had a sneak peek and it looks amazing—I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.
Emoji Dick
Melville’s masterpiece, translated into Japanese emoticons. All 6438 sentences. Made possible with Kickstarter and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Social Media Icons — Paul Robert Lloyd
A set of icons (in different sizes) from various trendy websites to use in your designs.
Throwboy
I need to get some RSS pillows.
Google, Microsoft, Apple sued over preview icons | Business Tech - CNET News
Further proof, as if any were needed, that the patent system turns into a steaming pile of shit as soon as it has dealings with software.
Video: Made in North Carolina: The Iconfactory
"GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) -- In a small nondescript office on West Friendly Ave., a group of designers produces tiny artistic masterpieces that millions of people interact with every day." Nice TV news video clip showing our heroes and their beauti…
Logica Stock Icon Family debuts at Iconfactory's Stockicons.com
Clean, businesslike icons by the icon artists behind Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.
mezzoblue § Chalkwork Basic Royalty-free Icons
Dave has made some icons — very nice ones.
YouTube - Wheee!
Anthropomorphic browser icons are funny.