Font Awesome icons

We might have come across a unique set of icons while writing for our project. Those icons or symbols add a massive impact on the byproduct of the project we have been creating. These icons portray a great user interface and also help illiterate users to use those properties behind the icons for which they are made. The power to deliver those unique and symbolic icons comes from a very popular tool known as Font Awesome.

It is a font and icon toolkit that is based on LESS and CSS. It is now incorporated into BootstrapCDN. It does not require any advance programming knowledge. It can be put to use directly in our projects with few lines of HTML code just like we do while importing Bootstrap for carrying operations easily with CSS. Another advantage of using Font Awesome icons is that this library or toolkit provides 519 free vector icons, which are completely free for both personal as well as commercial use.

Basics of Font Awesome

The custom styling icons can be alternatively used for displaying fonts in paragraphs, titles, and headers. Implementing Font Awesome into our web page adds many advantages. Some of the advantages are enlisted below.

1. No loss in scalability and definition.
2. There's less worry to care about the Retina displays.
3. It is quite easy to implement similar properties of CSS without actually having to edit the icon itself in terms of size, color, space, or gradient.
4. Same icons can be used in different sizes, colors to save time and space.
5. Font Awesome icons are highly efficient CSS byproducts. They deliver better performance and speed because of fewer HTTP requests.
6. Font Awesome icons load much faster than inline SVG or background.

Let's understand how Font Awesome icons can be imported and used in our projects.

The first task is to import the load library. To load the Font Awesome library into your project, simply import the below-given code into your index.html file.

In general, font icons are the symbols representing some actions on the web page of applications. They are called scalable vector icons because they can be easily customized by using increasing or decreasing size, color, shadow, etc. The above code should be included in the header file of our HTML file. It is a standard way of importing the Font Awesome icons into our file.

Once we add the above-given code snippet into our header section in the index.html file, we can start using the font awesome icons. There's no requirement for further installations or downloads separately. We can use the font awesome icons with the <span> or <i> tags along with the CSS as shown in the below code snippet.

The output of the above-given code is displayed as the image given below.

The above usage of icons are based on the method of applying the below code concept as shown.

Another application of Font Awesome is animating icons. It is similar to the page loading icon that keeps rotating back and forth until the request is complete. All of such fantastic properties can be imported from the Font Awesome icons. Below is one way to use these animated icons.

Output

The output shown above is moving although it doesn't appear. Compile the above code snippet into the index.html file, and observe these icons as moving. The Font Awesome icons offer pre-built icons ready to be imported as and when required into your project. There are still thousands of icons that can be implemented using Font Awesome.

In the similar way there are multiple applications of opting font awesome icons. Consider some more example of implementing them with different use cases.

In this example, we have used the SVG elements in JavaScript to consider the usage of font awesome icons. The above code sample would provide all the SVG elements needed with your web project if you include this into your source file. The path above is left blank for the purpose of adding local path of the users and can be edited by changing the base features once copied into this code. Once added, this would add a reference to the copied URL and the properties of font awesome icons can be easily imported with SVG elements.

You might also consider one last example for using font awesome icons. In this example, multiple stack items will be discussed. Consider the below example code.

In this example, we have tried to make things more complex while using font awesome icons. Since most of web applications these days have multiple icons, we have implemented the multi stack elements present in the font awesome icon directory as fa-stack. This would import all the stack items into your working directory and the results after compiling would appear as coded in the above snippet.