Icon Fonts: the Best Simple Design Resource

A couple years back, I picked up something in a bundle that became my favorite little design tool: the Pictos Font. It's an icon font — a font with icons instead of each letter, like Webdings but nicer — and one of the nicest in my opinion. It's organized nicely — icons are usually on the first letter in that object's name — and the icons are simple yet elegant.

You've likely seen the Pictos icons if you've paid attention to my articles at AppStorm, where I'll often reach for a Pictos icon when I need a basic elemental icon for an article logo. They're only a T away in Photoshop, and are infinitely resizable and tweakable. If you want some flat design, all it takes is good colors and a nicely aligned icon from the font, and you're good.

Icon fonts are far from new, but they're most popular in web dev circles for a nice way to add icons to your UI. But that's not all they're useful for: you could use them to spice up a report, add icons to your print designs, and more. Resizing and coloring them is simple, with the same font settings you're used to. And there's some that go beyond replacing a single letter with an icon: FF Chartwell lets you turn numbers into auto-generated graphs with, yes, just a font, and Symbolset that uses OpenType features to turn words (say "heart) into icons.

There's tons out there, and you should pick some up to help in your designs, whether you're a budding designer or a pro. I love Pictos, but it's far from the only one out there. There's the free Any Old Icon font built from zany, community contributed icons by my colleagues at Envato, for starts. Then, CSS Tricks has a huge roundup of the best icon fonts, some free, some paid. If you need more icons, check out the ambitious Noun Project for loose icons not in fonts (though some are in fonts as well).

And enjoy designing with type. Pure type.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.