

Ask HN: What are your favourite free icon web fonts? - dutchbrit

Looking for a decent &amp; free icon web font for an open source project. What icon fonts do you &lt;3?
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Someone1234
We've used Bootstrap's free icons by Glyphicons they're pretty nice, and we
considered buying a licence for the full set but the redistribution terms
weren't clear enough (i.e. do people we sell our software to also need to buy
a licence from Glyphicons?).

Font Awesome are alright, but the quality felt like a step backwards from
Glyphicons.

We wound up going with Google's Material Design icon set[0][1]. Released under
Creative Commons, and can either be self hosted or can utilise Google's CDN.
Has a nice selection, and can be rendered via SVG, PNG, or an i tag e.g. <i
class="material-icons">alarm</i>. Only requires a single reference to the font
file to start utilising.

The only downside with Google's Material Design icon set is that it has
compatibility issues with Internet Explorer 9 and older. For older IE support,
instead of writing pretty HTML like:

<i class="material-icons">face</i>

You write nonsense like this:

<i class="material-icons">&#xE87C;</i>

Eww. But since our project breaks in IE9 anyway, we could utilise their font
library AND use the prettier style of HTML. So no big downside to us.

The fonts are easy to stylise and Google provides a few recommended CSS styles
(e.g. md-dark, md-18, md-light, etc) on the developer page.

[0] [https://google.github.io/material-design-
icons/](https://google.github.io/material-design-icons/)

[1]
[https://www.google.com/design/icons/](https://www.google.com/design/icons/)

------
seaneking
Use something like [https://icomoon.io](https://icomoon.io) and just mix-n-
match between sets. Personally I've found that no one set covers everything I
need (though I generally default back to the Material Design font), and there
are enough sets with a similar aesthetic that you can still achieve a
consistent look.

------
ramkumarceg
[http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-
Awesome/](http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/)

If you use css frameworks like Foundation or Bootstrap they come with their
own set of font icons as well.

