Font Awesome 5 is nearly here and it looks, well, awesome

A note on the coming Font Awesome 5 release and why scalable icon systems became so useful in front-end design.

Why icon systems took over

Before scalable icon sets, interface symbols were images, and every size and colour variant was another file to produce and cache. Treating icons as glyphs meant a single dependency could serve a whole interface, scale cleanly, and be recoloured with the same CSS that styles text.

What the fifth version changes

The headline of the new release is a redrawn set with more consistent weights and a move toward SVG delivery alongside the font, which addresses the accessibility and rendering complaints that icon fonts accumulated over the years.

The practical effect for a front-end developer is that icons stop being a typographic hack and start being real elements you can label, hide from assistive technology when decorative, and style individually.

Using icons without overusing them

An icon set improves scanning when it is used consistently and hurts it when every list item gets a symbol. The useful discipline is to decide which categories of thing get an icon before adding any, rather than decorating afterwards.

Decorative icons should be hidden from screen readers; meaningful ones need a text label. Getting that split right is the difference between an icon system that helps and one that produces a wall of unnamed symbols.