I agree with the thrust of your article, Jon, in so far as icons in web fonts have huge potential. However, assuming we eventually have great screen rendering and sufficiently refined control in CSS, they ought to be mapped to unicode code points that already exist for a vast majority of the common symbols we need in interfaces.
My view is that other techniques should be a last resort, and dingbats should be avoided for all the right reasons. For more on why, see my article on icons, unicode, and dingbats and some of the comments, in particular the succinct comment of Joe Clarke .
For projects that warrant it, a custom typeface could easily be created, using the correct unicode symbol mapping, and private use code points for custom icons. Wouldn’t that be something!
Jon Tan
I agree with the thrust of your article, Jon, in so far as icons in web fonts have huge potential. However, assuming we eventually have great screen rendering and sufficiently refined control in CSS, they ought to be mapped to unicode code points that already exist for a vast majority of the common symbols we need in interfaces.
My view is that other techniques should be a last resort, and dingbats should be avoided for all the right reasons. For more on why, see my article on icons, unicode, and dingbats and some of the comments, in particular the succinct comment of Joe Clarke .
For projects that warrant it, a custom typeface could easily be created, using the correct unicode symbol mapping, and private use code points for custom icons. Wouldn’t that be something!
Thanks for the interesting read. :)