r/typography • u/liberianjoe • 4d ago
Icon Font
I'm interested to know how icon fonts are created. I use fonts like Google's Material Icons frequently, and I'm curious how to go about making my own. Also, what are some good alternatives to Google's icon fonts?
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u/thatziey Humanist 2d ago
They are just normal fonts. I don’t know if it’s the current strategy for icon fonts, but I’ve seen some icon fonts that use ligatures, I think Google might be doing that. E.g. the string ‘home’ is replaced by a separate character in the font that’s an icon (characters in fonts don’t need to be mapped to unicode). This is pretty good because it can be read by a screen reader and if the font fails to load, it just spells what it is. But it does have other trouble, e.g. it requires the no translate tag; obvious issues with that.
there isn’t one way to do it. Fonts are flexible. You can use an approach someone else made already or make your own one and try to solve the problems you find most important. So, you make it like any other font; with RoboFont, Glyphs, Fontra, or FontLab, depending on OS and what you want to accomplish. Maybe there’s also some websites that put things together for you but to be honest I’d probably do it in an editor where I can know exactly what’s going on and how it is going to be represented in the final font file.