As product designers, we regularly work with icons in our design process. The most common and popular way to incorporate icons is by using icon libraries. These libraries — whether available as Figma…

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Google and Apple have introduced the use of fonts for delivering icons, which offers benefits like performance optimization, scalability, easier integration for developers, streamlined asset management, dynamic styling capabilities, and enhanced accessibility. While traditional methods using PNG or SVG files have their advantages, icon fonts provide a simplified and efficient approach for scalable and dynamic icon libraries.

Icons as fonts: Why Google and Apple are embracing this new approach

Not completely new, I’ve been using FontAwesome for 12+ years…
But, I do love these material libraries.
My goto is Fontawesome. If I don’t find what I need there which is 99% of the time I’ll look at SVG Repo: <a href="https://www.svgrepo.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://www.svgrepo.com/</a>

Icon fonts were a novelty back in 2012, but even then, they came with significant drawbacks—accessibility challenges, inconsistent rendering across platforms, and bloated font files . SVG solved a lot it and why are we going back?

H? New approach? Are you kidding? We were nearly forced to stop using icon fonts in favor of inline svg and svg sprites and now we’re going back to woff ? It may be easier to organize, but it’s a pain to edit the icons, add and remove, make them colorful etc…

“new”? No thanks, SVG is the future.