Font Awesome 5 Icons:

Icon fonts are delivered to your website as actual font characters, which means they can be styled just like regular text. This allows you to lower page load times and create clean, crisp designs.

You can use the icon classes Fas and Fab to stack icons or to add a shadow to an icon. These classes also help you adjust icon sizing.

Getting Started:

If you haven’t tried using Font Awesome 5 before, it can seem a little daunting at first. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to get started. It can be included in your website with a few lines of code (depending on the method) or by using a plugin.

You can also install it locally, via NPM or Yarn, and then integrate it into your site with CSS. You can find a lot of useful information in the documentation.

For most users, though, the easiest way to use it is with a Kit. A Kit is a set of files that can be embedded into your site, either as webfont or SVGs. Webfonts are delivered as actual font characters and can be styled in the same way that regular fonts are, while SVGs are more compatible with modern browsers. Either option works well with WordPress and can save you a significant amount of time and effort. It’s also the preferred option if you want to use power transforms or masking.

Transforms:

The Font Awesome team added a number of features that allow you to do limitless customizations on icons using Power Transforms. However, these are only available if you use the SVG + JS version of Font Awesome. This project aims to provide the same functionality using straight CSS.

For example, you can rotate or flip your icons with the fa-rotate and fa-flip classes. You can also stack them with a parent element with the fa-stack class to vertically align them. Similarly, you can set the background color of icons with the data-fa-glow attribute.

You can also use icon markup in pistons and values, especially in the Evaluation Console. This allows you to preview how a Font Awesome 5 icon will appear in your piston’s final design.

Masking:

Whether you’re using the Font Awesome plugin or inserting them manually, you can make your site load faster by using only the icons you actually need. This is also a great way to reduce the amount of data that’s loaded on your website.

In order to do this, you need to use the mask prop in Font Awesome. This allows you to define your normal icon and then set a second one to lay on top, constrained within the size of the first.

For more information, you can check out this article on how to use the mask prop in Font Awesome. You can also try putting this code on your site to test out the effect:

React:

Icons are an important part of modern web development. They help us convey meaning to our users and make the experience more intuitive. Font Awesome 5 is a great icon set that caters to most of our icon needs.

One of the great features of FA5 is its sizing. It’s easy to size icons relative to a certain point using named sizes like small, medium, and large or numbered sizing (2x, 3x, etc). And you can even rotate the icon by adding a rotation prop.

Another great feature of FA5 is its compatibility with React. You can add FA5 to your page by importing the react-font awesome library. This package uses Mutation Observers which watch for changes in the DOM and update the icon accordingly. This keeps your bundle sizes small as you only import the icons you need. This method also gives you the flexibility to use the FA5 fas prefix which is the default for Solid icons and the fab style for brand icons.