Useful Tip: Font Awesome

Twitter Bootstrap has provided the developer community with a well structured template for our applications that doesn’t look too bad. (If you think it looks absolutely terrible, you’re probably a developer because you’ve seen it everywhere.)

They even ship a set of icons that you can use in your applications. This isn’t the horribly overused Silk Icon set either. However, even with 140 icons you might find some things lacking, such as scaling and more flexiblity.

That’s where Font Awesome comes in. As a replacement for the existing icons, Font Awesome is a desktop font that allows you to scale and color the icons with regular CSS. Github updated their website a while ago in a similar fashion with their new Octicons.

Here are a handful of icons you can use:

There are 220 icons, so you get 80 more icons and most of them look great. They’re a bit more rounded than the original set, but of course if you’re in need of perfect icons, I’m sure you have your own graphic designer to use. For the rest of us just looking to get by, I highly recommend checking out Font Awesome. I use it most of my Rails application prototypes these days because it’s so easy to use.

Have another icon font that you’d like to share or another tool like this that’s really cool? Please post a link in the comments!