

Font Awesome 3.0 Released - sub-setting, pixel perfect at 14px, better license - fortawesome
http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/?v=3.0.0

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fortawesome
Every icon has been redesigned from the ground up to be pixel perfect at
Bootstrap's default 14px. We've partnered with icnfnt.com to allow sub-setting
of the font to get just the icons you use on your site, keeping load times way
down. And there's a more open license (SIL Open Font License). And there's new
styles with spinners.

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jdorfman
Great work @fortawesome! 3.0 is now on BootstrapCDN:
<http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/fontawesome.html>

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fortawesome
Excellent! I'll see about adding that to the docs. Very helpful! Who do I talk
to to get this updated for the next release?

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jdorfman
@fortawesome just email me jdorfman at netdna dot com

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crazygringo
Wow. Am I the only one who _doesn't_ like the pixel-perfect alignment?

I hate to rain on the parade, but the v2 icons were beautiful -- all perfectly
proportioned. Absolutely fantastic. The new ones have to distort things to
align to the grid, and wind up looking inconsistent and unbalanced.

I'm comparing the new icons with my downloaded version of 2.0, and, for
example, the "i" in the "info" icon is no longer centered. Or, now icons like
"asterisk" or "ban-circle" have strokes that are too thick, while "envelope"
is too skinny -- since strokes basically have to be 1px or 2px, I guess.

Previously, the icons were drawn in a balanced and consistent way, and all
looked good together. Now, their widths and shapes have been shoehorned into a
14px grid that frankly destroys a lot of their charm and consistency.

Pixel-fitting made perfect sense when fonts weren't anti-aliased, but now that
almost everyone has even subpixel hinting enabled, it's anachronistic. The
FontAwesome team has done a great job with introducing _new_ icons, but it
saddens me to see what were once beautifully proportioned icons that showed
excellent design taste, now take a giant step _backwards_.

In a strange way, it reminds me of when IKEA stopped using Futura and started
using Verdana a couple years ago. Excellent design being replaced by mediocre
design which is more "technologically accessible"...

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mnicole
Oof, noticed this too. I only use them in small sizes so it isn't worth the
upgrade if it's just going to make them fuzzy and thinned-out. :/

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fortawesome
The updates are specifically to improve the rendering at smaller font sizes.

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mnicole
Guess I'm confused then, because looking at them at the small sizes on the
site itself, they have these issues.

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ZeroGravitas
It's the old "fuzzy approximation of real shape vs sharp representation of a
shape altered to look sharp at low pixel density" argument all over again,
which last flared up when Apple released Safari for Windows.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-
resp...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-respecting-
the-pixel-grid.html)

If you assume the other side is simply "doing it wrong" then conversation
rapidly goes downhill, it's an engineering trade-off.

I personally like the fuzzy side of things, and I thought that they'd added
hinting (possibly via ttfautohint) to make them sharp at small sizes on
platforms than need hints (i.e. Windows basically). But, possibly to make it
easier for people to contribute, they've conformed the icons to a grid at all
sizes, and for all platforms, instead.

It's possible this was done to appease the Bootstrap devs, who were very picky
about small scale rendering being pixel perfect and gave that as a reason for
sticking with glyphicon hand drawn pngs. But its seems those same devs have
chosen to go with fuzzy vectors glyphicons for Bootstrap 3.

I'll probably go with using those, which is a shame as I like the open
contribution model and new license of Font-Awesome better. (Talking of which,
how can it be openly licensed via SIL, but still allow glyph contributers to
keep CC-BY-SA?)

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lnanek2
I've even seen Android devs using these icon fonts now. It's actually one of
the easiest way to do vector icons, and they can be colored dynamically using
a Shader class.

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kmfrk
What is a great way to constantly stay on top of changes to Font Awesome?
Occasional c/p, or do some use git submodules?

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fortawesome
I announce all major updates on twitter: @fortaweso_me.

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ecaron
Yet another great example of the problem with Twitter and not having any
policy/business-plan for dealing with squatter accounts.

They should, if account is unusued for 3 months, send an email saying "are you
still using this" and just ask the person to login to verify they are. If that
email (and multiple subsequent) aren't answered within 3 months, the person
initiating the "claim unusued handle" request gets the handle.

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ithcy2
Apparently they're working on it:
[https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-
account-...](https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-
policy)

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Pezmc
This looks great! I've seen it used before very well.

But the animated icon's look really naff. For me (Chrome version 23), they
shake all over the place as they animate, does anyone else see this?

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fortawesome
Yeah, that's one of the things I'm updating. Getting animations to appear the
same in every browser is a pretty deep rabbit hole, and full of changing one
breaks another.

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aioprisan
This is a great tool that provides a lot of great icons! We use it at
taskup.com and we're glad to see that more icons are added

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tagliala
imho (most of) those icons look better than glyphicons's vectorial ones in BS
3.0

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Raphael
Will the 14px perfection still look good at standard powers of 2?

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fortawesome
Absolutely. Actually, it looks pretty good anywhere larger than 14px, too. But
multiples of 14px will render best.

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webbruce
Hell yeah! I love font-awesome, use it for every Rails project.

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duncans
Nitpick: "subset", not "sub-set"

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Goopplesoft
Waiting for kickstrap now...

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adamkochanowicz
It's available now:
[http://getkickstrap.com/extras/permalink/fontawesome-30-3951...](http://getkickstrap.com/extras/permalink/fontawesome-30-395177/)

Read instructions carefully.

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xauronx
Awesome work!

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dmackerman
Great set.

