

Pictos Icon Font Server - enra
http://pictos.cc/server

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pbhjpbhj
Using a font to provide icons on your website. It appears that the Pictos way
is a font-replacement method using js? My first thought is that this should be
relatively easy to replicate using <http://thenounproject.com> (or similar) as
the source of the icons.

I like the idea: kind of an extension of sprites to using the font file as the
sprite holder; not sure if that's any more efficient though due to the cross-
browser issues of webfonts.

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drewwilson
Nope :) There is no JS involved. Its a straight CSS file. Browser detection is
done on the server by checking the headers. it's lightning fast :)

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pbhjpbhj
The reason I put the question mark there was that I wasn't sure if the example
I was looking at was a full demo. I forget now which page - but it was
definitely doing something with JS on empty divs - pretty sure it was the
display examples on the front page; looking at them with inspect element on
FF... although perhaps they just look like empty divs ...

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cemregr
Drew is one of the most prolific designer/developers around. I wonder if he
ever sleeps. You should check out his other projects too:
<http://drewwilson.com/>

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ned
Interesting service, and very well executed.

The one problem that I have with pictograms-as-fonts is anti-aliasing. The
designers that I work with spend hours to make their icons absolutely perfect
at every pixel size that they'll be displayed at. This is particularly visible
when the icon has horizontal or vertical lines. Most of the time you'll want
them have a hard edge, and with anti-aliasing you can never be sure you'll get
that result.

This will change in a few years when all our screens have high pixel
densities, but for the time being I'm sticking with PNG sprites, with hand-
tweeked pixels.

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drewwilson
You can use this CSS rule to make them look like Photoshop:

-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

only works in webkit, which is most all mobile and chrome/safari.

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cheald
This doesn't seem to work in Chrome on Windows; do you know of any workarounds
there? That's not really a small market segment anymore, and I'm not sure I
could sell our design team on font icons without a viable solution.

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resnamen
What are the advantages in using a remote service for this vs. hosting them
yourself? I'm somewhat averse to taking out additional dependencies on other
services if no compelling reason exists.

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drewwilson
Everything is cached and served very quickly. The main advantage is you can
change the icons on the fly at no additional cost. If you update your
interface, add new icons or remove some, you can make those changes in that
app and you don't even need to grab a new code snippet.

If you want to serve them yourself, that option is there as well. Thanks!!

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jakozaur
The client list seems to be impressive, but I haven't seen those icons on any
mentioned customer... is it true at all?

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drewwilson
Yes it's very true. All the customers in that list are people who have
purchased my icon sets. Some of them use then in internal tools, some use them
for their public website or mobile apps. Thanks!

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hhastings
Pictos & Pictos Font have been around for a while, and my bet is that the vast
majority of UX/UI Designers know of Drew Wilson's work. This is an extremely
clever solution for an age old problem: As designers, we can now enable our
clients to swap out icons to match their updated text/copy content.

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teeny
It's a cool idea; but why they are using a png sprite for the icons on their
own site?

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blakeperdue
Yeah, very strange that they wouldn't want to show off their product by
actually using on their site.

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drewwilson
If you click the "See Examples" button, you can view the font being used.
Thanks!!

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armandososa
This is a great idea. I already bought Pictos icons and fonts twice (for
personal use, and for my day work) and I always thought that it would be nice
to be able to have a tool that allow me to use a subset only.

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notatoad
Am I wrong, or is this a terrible rip off? Anybody who has the need for this
should be able to host a single $19 file on their site for minimal cost.

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cleverjake
if you only want two files of the entire set, its better for your bandwidth
and the clients speed to have a custom font that only includes those two
icons. It is fairly trivial with fontforge, but a lot of people don't have the
time and/or ability to do it.

