Font Awesome 4 Icons:
Font Awesome is a huge set of scalable vector icons that are easy to add to your website. It’s super fast to load and is well-supported across all browsers.
Get started with Font Awesome by creating a free account and receiving your Kit Code. Then simply add the code to your head> section.
Color:
Font Awesome provides scalable vector icons that can be easily customized with CSS. This means you can change icon color, size, drop shadow, and anything else that is possible with regular font styles.
It’s also super easy to add additional sizing with classes such as fa-xs for small icons, fa-xl for large ones, and fa-2x for specific sizes. This makes it super simple to use on any device or screen size and works well with Bootstrap components.
Font Awesome Pro also has a bunch of other features that are beneficial for your site. For example, it can auto-subset so only the icons you actually use are downloaded, resulting in faster load times. It can also be lazyloaded, which further improves performance and reduces bandwidth usage.
Size:
As the icons are vector based, they can easily be scaled up or down without losing quality. They also work well on Retina Displays as they are pixel-perfect. Moreover, the icons can be easily styled with CSS. This makes it easy for you to change their color, size, shadow, and anything else that is possible with CSS.
Another advantage of Font Awesome is that it supports icon stacking. It is a great way to make your website look neat and organized. Moreover, it can help in improving the performance of your website. It does this by auto-subsetting — it only downloads the icons that you use, rather than the entire library. This means faster page loads. Additionally, it’s screen reader compatible and doesn’t trip up any of the popular browsers.
Stacked:
When adding Font Awesome icons to your content, you can stack them to display multiple icon variants on a single element. This can be used to create dynamic icons in your content, such as a counter of how many messages you’ve received on your envelope icon. You can do this by wrapping the icon into a span with the fa-layers class.
You can also add a class like fa-inverse to change the color of an icon, or the fa-fw to set them at a fixed width. These classes are useful when different icon widths throw off alignment, or in Bootstrap’s navlist and list groups.
This is an alternative to using a plugin, but remember that it may not work as well in the future when a plugin is no longer updated. For better results, Stackable is recommended.
Inverse:
While Font Awesome is very popular for a good reason, some designers may not realize just how much it can do. It has tons of built-in options for rotating, flipping, and scaling icons, as well as a few animations that come right out of the box.
To use an icon, just add i class=”fa”>/i> anywhere on your page. The first class identifies the element as being an icon, and the second identifies the specific Font Awesome icon to load.
To stack multiple icons, use the fa-stack-1x or fa-stack-2x classes. The fa-inverse class can also be used as an alternative icon color. For larger icons, the fa-fixed width class can be added to the parent to control sizing. This is particularly useful for Bootstrap navlists and lists.
Fixed Width:
Font Awesome comes with a huge set of icons for all kinds of purposes. Using them is simple and straightforward. There are many advantages to using icons as fonts compared to other approaches like using raster or SVG graphics. They are flexible and scalable and can be styled with CSS (color, size, drop shadow, etc). This is great in the age of responsive web design.
They also take up less space than raster or SVG images and can be lazyloaded for even faster load times. They are also much more browser compatible than most other icon sets. In addition, all of the icons are included in one file so it only takes a single HTTP request to load the entire library. This is very good for website performance.
