MyBB Community Forums

So, most of us are using font awesome in our themes, the icon font delivers scaleable graphics and a quick easy way to add the icons to our themes.

Is there a reason to NOT use font awesome or any icon font?

• Its huge unless you make a custom build and host it.
  
  
• Hosting your own build can cause font-loading to fail if you don't do it right....but only in some browsers in some circumstances
  
  
• If the font doesnt load because of some settings in the users browser then the site is covered in empty white boxes or weird symbols.
  
  
• It adds a ton of extra markup with all those i class fa fa-bla in the html.
  
  

Interested to hear what other coders/designers think and their preferred approach with /alternatives to font awesome.


Disclaimer: I use fontawesome everywhere

Well, whilst it is quite large for a small one page site, for larger sites i think it's size is fine. When you have a large sites and dozens of icons, having an icon font is far more efficient than loading tons of image icons.

Then considering the flexibility in scaling, recolouring, animation. I think its great ^_^

The classes aren't really that much of a problem especially in themes, because you have it in one place. If you were using SASS you could do something like this: http://genesy.me/font-awesome-mixin/

Then you can have a "icon-search" class applied that extends "fa fa-search" or a "icon-forum-unread" that extends "fa fa-circle-o". Then you can have the icon selection held in the sass, requiring only a single change

I only load it as a whole while developing.

Later on I'm compiling a custom build.

Font awesome is not my favorite icon font, I'd have to give that one to the Android Material Design icons but I appreciate it's ease of use and some of it's classes like icon-stack.

I use Font Awesome with nearly every project I start. Example: http://i.imgur.com/XAd0Lzj.png
Don't mind the design, I've only been working on it for a couple of days so far.

I love how easy it is to use and set up. It takes literally minutes to start making websites look more beautiful. I don't mind the size so much, especially when you consider using a CDN. I consider most of the negative points things that can be avoided or fixed if you know what you're doing.

I can't even recall the days where I used images for icons. The thought makes me shudder.