
Fonticons (YC S15) Is A Subscription Icon Service From The Maker Of Font Awesome - katm
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/yc-backed-fonticons-is-a-subscription-icon-service-from-the-creator-of-font-awesome/
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seabass
In the past I've been able to just import Font Awesome and custom icons into
[https://icomoon.io/app](https://icomoon.io/app) and create a custom kit that
way. That's something that has existed for free for quite some time now with
support for png/svg/font exports. It looks like the Font Awesome guys just put
a price tag on an existing idea. Is there something novel about this that I'm
missing?

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fortawesome
There are definitely some similarities with other services, no question. But
we think about icons differently and we think we can solve the problem better.
(For instance, you can copy and paste vectors directly out of Illustrator CC.
And watch the number of icon sets, we're about to add lots more.)

We're going to keep making things better and better.

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tptacek
This is neat. Dumb question, but one I think a lot of your clients will have:
how easy is it to drop one of these sets into Bootstrap and have them work the
same way Glyphicons do?

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fortawesome
Works almost exactly the same way. Fonticons also has all the extra features
Font Awesome has -- larger sizes, icons in lists, flipped, rotated, animated.
And you can pare that CSS down to be just what you need, too. Speed, speed,
speed.

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fortawesome
Hey folks. Dave Gandy here. Happy to answer any questions and hear any
thoughts. :)

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Bromlife
I subscribed to this from the early days, but in the end I cancelled my
account. I just didn't get enough value out of it to justify paying a monthly
fee. But I probably didn't truly understand what this service is _for_. Can
you please explain it to me ELI5?

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fortawesome
I'll see what I can do. If I miss it, let me know. :) (And I'm assuming you're
familiar with Font Awesome and think it's worth using.)

Fonticons is for when you outgrow Font Awesome: \- maybe you want to design
and use your own icons, like your company logo (our copy and paste out of
Illustrator CC is super simple), but rolling your own icon font is daunting \-
maybe you don't want to serve all 519 icons when your site uses 20 \- maybe
you want an icon set that looks different from Font Awesome (our icon
marketplace, which is about to grow quite quickly, will have a whole range of
styles)

As your site's icon needs get more specific, hopefully Fonticons make sense.

Any better?

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readme
These icons are so nice they make me want to write a bunch of apps just for
the sake of using the particular icons...

Ooh weather icons. I think another weather app is needed....

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fortawesome
And there will be lots more where that came from. So many more. :)

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geeio
Love it. We've been using it in production since the beta.

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sunflowerdeath
As you can download custom iconfont and put in on any static server, it
happens that they actually sell ~1mb static hosting for 100$ year. It does not
make any sense.

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rory096
Do you guys have data on the tradeoff between subsetting for smaller file size
and cache hits? When people use subsets on the CDN, are they de-duped so the
same subset on another site would still be cached? If it does make a
difference, would you release data on the popularity of various subsets?

(Also I hope you guys have a search box for that feature - icnfnt.com always
made for a fun game of "spot these icons" for the whole office)

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fortawesome
Cache hits vs subsetting FA only is probably a wash overall. I don't have
numbers for that specifically, but that's my strong hunch.

As soon as you want to add your logo or use a different icon set, it's worth
it. I think Fonticons is more important if you're looking for something a bit
different, style-wise.

(We're dogfooding Fonticons on Fonticons. And we had a lot of fun with some of
our error pages:
[https://fonticons.com/404.html](https://fonticons.com/404.html),
[https://fonticons.com/500.html](https://fonticons.com/500.html),
[https://fonticons.com/503.html](https://fonticons.com/503.html). Copy and
pasting icons out of Illustrator makes it super fast.)

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hrayr
Hey Dave, just wanted to thank you for fontawesome. Fonticons looks pretty
cool as well, just signed up.

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fortawesome
Thanks! And _definitely_ let us know if there's anything we can do to help!

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jarek-foksa
I wouldn't put the word "font" in the company name. In the near future SVG
symbols may become the preferred way of shipping icons on the web.

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nestlequ1k
check out fontastic.me which i've been using for 2yrs and its amazing.

