00:00 Matt: Welcome to podcast awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and murdery with members of the fun awesome team. I'm your host, Matt Johnson. And in this podcast, I catch up with icon designers, Jory Raphael and Noah Jacobus. We explore a brief history of font awesome icons and styles from the early days of font awesome to the present day.

00:47 Matt: So we have got a newish icon designer, Noah Jacobus on board and Jory, I was wondering if you could give us a kind of a background on how that beautiful relationship came together and when Noah came on board and tell us a little bit about that. 

Jory: Noah for a while now has been one of my designer crushes. So yeah, it's true. It's true. Yeah, you know, the type person you'd see share some work with the world, put some work out there and you would just think to yourself immediately like, you know, wish I had done that. I can't do that. Why am I even in this industry? I'm a freaking imposter. 

Noah: Lies. 

Jory: Is so much better than me. All the work he creates is beautiful and engaging and lovely. And so and so the way the way I got over my jealousy of Noah's work was to hire him because now I'm hoping a little bit of the talent will rub off. But yeah, I mean, it's serious. No, I'm serious. I've known I've kind of been digitally connected, you know, web friends for a few years. And, you know, in the last couple of years started speaking more and more specifically in regards to icon design and Figma and kind of picking his brain for how to how to make the transition on our own at Font  Awesome. And so he's just someone I super, super admire and got him to do a little contract work for us. And the fit with the team and the and the product was just great.

02:46 Jory: And I'm thrilled that he joined us. 

Matt: Yeah, likewise. So the first thing that you started working on, was it on Sharp Icons before you came on board? Did you do a chunk of those or? 

Noah: Yes, that was the kind of the first little batch of contract stuff that we started looking at together was how do we start to transition these thousands of icons into a sharp style and thinking about what sorts of rules we might want to apply and what made sense to what sorts of things to change and what to keep the same and just kind of testing the waters a little bit on Sharp. And here you are knocking out Sharp. One style at a time. Yep, it's somehow I've fooled you all and you'll eventually discover I have no idea what I'm doing.

03:40 Jory: Wait, wait, what? Matt, you just heard that, right? Right.

03:49 Matt: I need to make a phone call you guys. So how about a little bit about your background, Jory? When did like how did your connection with Dave come about and what was going on all the time? Like how many iterations in was he on Font  Awesome? And how did that working relationship come together?

04:12 Noah: You know, as an icon designer, and it's funny even calling myself an icon designer, and I certainly am now my role is shifting a little bit here at Font Awesome. But I think I kind of made the decision to be an icon designer seven years ago, maybe at this point, I mean, I'd been designing icons and I had created some of my own icon sets, but there was I had been working at a startup that as startups often do, decided to shut our stores. And I had a little bit of free time and I decided that you know what, I want to give a little bit more attention to icon design in general. 

And so I am focused on my own icons at symbolicons and realized that you know, maybe I can do a Kickstarter to spend some time on that. And the goal is to basically, if I can, you know, maybe support my family for like a month or two on the Kickstarter so that I can get these icons out, as I'm kind of bridging the gap between my next gig. And at that time, as I was working on that Kickstarter was right around the same time that Font Awesome was having their Kickstarter. And for Font Awesome 5 and Font  Awesome 5 Pro and that Kickstarter was, you know, blowing the roof off of things. And it was great. And I, you know, as I often do is I just reach out to people who I admire and who are doing cool things and just say hi and make some connections. And Dave and I had been in contact a few years prior to that because I had created some icon sets that were being used on Symbolset, which was an old kind of cool web-based icon font provider. And I had some icon sets there and Font Awesome actually, Fort Awesome at the time, which was kind of a side thing, ended up acquiring Symbolset. 

And so Dave and I had discussions back then. And when we were in the midst of this Kickstarter, I was in the midst of mine and Font  Awesome was in the midst of theirs, I reached out to Dave and was just like, hey, man, like, I love what you're doing. It's cool. It's doing really well. And Dave kindly enough offered to like, hey, you're doing a Kickstarter too. Why don't we just mention it to the people who have supported us? And he sent out an email just basically saying like, hey, here's another cool icon project some of our friends are working on. And that pushed me over the limit with my Kickstarter. And it was amazing. And gave me a little bit more runaway, which was lovely. But that kind of started more and more conversations. 

And then Dave reached out to me and said, hey, would you ever consider doing any freelance work for us? And I said, sure. And so I started doing some freelance work for them. Because at that point, Font  Awesome 5 had been promised and was mostly completed. And Dave had kind of taken a first pass at all of the icons within Font  Awesome 5. But then we kind of come up against the limit of there are all these stretch goals of new categories to create and ultimately some new styles to create as well. And so much like I kind of leaned on Noah to help us get Sharp out the door and ultimately work on more things, Dave at that time kind of leaned on me to help get the rest of Font  Awesome 5 out the door. And that freelance work quickly kind of turned into a job offer. And I joined Font  Awesome just about five years ago now. And I've been here ever since. Font  Awesome 5 was a great success. 

And as is our tendency, we say, great, what's next? And what was next was Font  Awesome 6. And really what we wanted to do with 6 was add another style, which was thin. And then that, this is a joke, and I don't even know if I should be admitting this, but we have a lovely video that we created for Font  Awesome 6 for the campaign we are kind of internally doing to promote 6 and get people on board for that. And as we are brainstorming the script for that and coming up with things, just on a little whiteboard at the end of one of our company retreats, you know, we wrote some of the things on the board that could be there. And one of the, one bullet point was just like Sharp icons. We thought, oh, that'd be great to do some Sharp icons someday and didn't really put much thought into it. And then somehow that ended up in the script. And it ended up in the video and it ended up as a promise. And that's awesome. Except we hadn't fully designed them yet. Not the greatest thing, I don't think, anyway, to promise something and then not have it ready. But, you know, I think we were kind of clear that Sharp will be coming. We weren't going to say it was ready upon the 6th release. So, yeah, so that kind of led into working on some Sharp on my own and then ultimately getting Noah on board. And, you know, at this point, we just released the Sharp solid style and it looks awesome. And we're gearing up to release the Sharp regular style. And then after that, the light and the thin and the duotone. And then we've got some other stuff planned as well, which I'm not going to mention because I don't want to put myself in the same situation. 

09:41 Matt: Yeah, nice. I love how you guys kind of have, it's almost like parallel stories in a sense where you are creating icons, you know, with independent projects or, you know, if you have opportunities, you know, professionally to work on icons. Noah, it sounds like you've reflected on that where it was sort of like your favorite kind of work to do. But then now you get to just completely focus on that. And it sounds like, Jory, that was sort of your experience too. It's like you're kind of doing it on the side. Yeah, I'm going to, I think I really want to focus on this.

10:21 Matt: And then you had an opportunity to actually do that exact thing. 

Jory: Yeah, it's a weird, I mean, this sounds like this is a little bit of a privileged thing to say. So I want to recognize that as I say it. So you can add all the caveats to that as you want. But I think there's a power to being able to spend a little bit of time focusing on what you love, or how kind of some mental energy around a direction you want to take your career, or a side project or anything. And for me, and I think for Noah a little bit was icons. Like I would create icons for other projects, and I always enjoyed doing it. And kind of on the side, I would create my own little sets, but I never gave it a full focus. 

And that when I did my Kickstarter, it actually was the first time I was able to sit down and really focus on this one thing. And it opened doors. And I'm here now and I'm working on icons now. And it is so great. And it's this little niche. And it's the weirdest thing to describe to people about what I do when they ask. And I start off by saying, oh, I'm a graphic designer. Oh, I, and then like, oh, what do you say? I'm like, okay, well, I design icons, like, you know, this little tiny, tiny picture. It was like, oh, like on your iPhone, I'm like, kind of, you know. So it's hard to kind of describe. But, you know, one of the fun things for me anyway is with Font Awesome is we're in a lot of websites. Like we have a very robust community, which is lovely. And more times than not, when I talk to someone and I'm able to be like, oh, well, where do you work? And, you know, and if it's a big kind of corporation or something, I'll pull up their website and I'll be like, oh yeah, that's one of our icons right there. Like, you know, you've seen our stuff. And he just didn't know it. And that's, I mean, that's one of my joys. I love seeing that all the time. 

My son was working on this little, what was he, he just, he just downloaded Cult of the Lamb. I don't know if you've heard of that Noah game. And he's playing it and we were just looking at it together and he popped up and there's like, well, some like little radio dial that pops up and you get to, he was like, hey, dad, can you help me? What, you know, where do I want to put my, I don't know whatever points are called, like as he's kind of building his skill tree. And I'm like, oh, hey, those are our icons right there. And that app, it's great. Just like, just seeing them in random places brings me so much joy. Yeah. That's great. So yeah, that just, you know, kind of circling back to just saying like having the freedom for me and even if it's working on the side product of focusing on this niche love of mine has opened

13:01Jory: up, you know, some doorways and very much altered the trajectory of my career. 

Matt: Yeah. That's fantastic. It doesn't happen that often. I do sense that to sort of company wide that in different ways, like everybody sort of expresses something similar, which is that we all just feel so lucky to work at a great company and focus on something very specific.

13:27 Matt:  It's pretty special. So I guess the question for you guys, for both of you is why icons? Like if somebody asked you like, what is it about? That seems like such a weird thing. Like why would you want to design icons? 

Jory: Man, I don't know. Because they're little perfect objects. I don't know. There's something. I mean, I guess that's kind of true. They're little perfect objects. So these little distillations of ideas and images and objects and in kind of their most simple form. And it brings me so much joy to just like take something and simplify it. And we've got the whole icon styles to create, but within that there's like little icons. You get little wins all these times. You get these. It sounds bad, but at least for me, you get little dopamine hits. You finished an icon. Little dopamine. Oh, yes. Oh, good. Oh, that looks good. Oh. So I like that there are these little, I like the artistic side of that. But I just like how powerful they're in communicating things because they, when done correctly and used correctly, are an incredibly powerful tool for sharing things with the world, for getting ideas across, for sharing information, for you know, even an arrow icon on a sign gets someone from one place to another. So

15:06 Jory: I think they can be pretty important. 

Matt: So what I think is so interesting about it is that when people like yourself, like you guys, you dedicate so much time and thought into this so that you can create something simple that goes unnoticed. That's such an interesting, I don't know if contrast is the right word, but there's so much depth of thought and energy that goes into a good icon design just so it can almost not be ignored, but serve a humble function in a way. You know, it's like if icons and wayfinding images and things like that are done well, you don't have to think about it. You just intuitively know where you need to go, what the next step is.

15:59 Matt: It's just interesting to me. 

Jory: I mean, good design is invisible, right? Yeah. I think that's the core of it is sure. I want people to admire what we've created when they really look at it, but if we're doing our jobs correctly, people aren't noticing it. And that's one reason I think why we talk a lot about how icons can be paired well with other elements. Like that's one of the selling points that we talk about, especially with like the new Sharp stuff that we've just rolled out. And some of the things that we talk about in a lot of that material was how to use these different style things and what sorts of contexts they would work well in because they are meant by and large, they are meant to do a job. 

And so making sure that they mesh with what you're trying to accomplish and that message you're trying to convey is really important. 

Matt: So how about you, Noah? When I ask you why icons, why do you obsess about icons? Why do you like building them? What's exciting to you about it? 

Noah: Yeah, it's probably a couple things. I mean, definitely building off of what Jory was saying, that these are a distillation of ideas. And they, you know, if we go back to humanity's first art, were icons before hieroglyphics, which are also sort of related, but going back to, you know, cave paintings and stuff like that, like these were ways to convey concepts or history or all different kinds of things. And they were simplified forms of nature and animals and stuff like that. 

And that's how a connection was able to be made between different groups of people. I mean, not to put our work onto too high of a pedestal, but it is in a way a continuation of that same line of art and craft in a way. And that's really exciting to think about. And it also adds a little bit of a feeling of responsibility to getting it right, which is nice. And that definitely makes me slow down and try to think more carefully about what I'm doing when I'm working on stuff too, thinking about it in that context. But the other thing that really excites me about icons is honestly the limitations about it. Because as long as I can remember any sort of creative thing that I've done in, you know, in school and like different creative endeavors and doing artwork and things like that, like the concept or writing even like the concept of the blank page or the blank canvas is just terrifying of like, especially if you're, you know, working digitally and you have an infinite canvas and it could be anything and you have all of these tools at your disposal, you know, there's nothing, you know, that is sometimes purported as a benefit. 

And it can be of like, oh, you can do anything you want. And there's no limits. But I have found that I really like constraints and constraints can engender a lot of creativity when you know what the box is, I guess, that you're trying to fill in. When you know there are certain decisions and certain things that you have to accomplish with what you're doing, you can that frees up a lot of decision making to be rerouted in more creative ways and

19:14 Noah figuring out how you can accomplish things in a certain specific way. I just really like that. 

Jory: Yeah. Well, I hate that. I want the infinite canvas. I want you get out. No, I agree. 

Matt: This is not that kind of show, Jory. Come now. There's kind of there's a there's a sort of humility to, which I don't know, maybe this sounds like I'm saying the very opposite of what I'm trying to say, but that the amount of thought that you guys put into this and all the constraints and everything and that these little things to the average viewer or user goes somewhat unnoticed. There's sort of a humility to the whole thing, you know, that like your guys's designs are have been viewed by so many people and yet they're not like in a they're not like any museum somewhere with like, you know …

Jory: We're working on it, Matt. We're working on it. 

Matt: Oh, I know. I know. I know. I mean, you know, I just love that idea that, yeah, there's so many folks that are interacting with these every day, and yet it's kind of nameless in a way. I don't know. It's very interesting. When you came on board, Font  Awesome around the time of the Font  Awesome 5 Kickstarter, what were the first projects that you worked on?

20:58 Jory: As I recently actually recently looked back and some of the very first icons I designed were were in the sports category. So there wasn't a sports category in Font  Awesome. So I designed a football and a baseball and all these little things. And the sports ball. Yeah, sports ball. No, that one only actually added recently. I can I so I have a beautiful shirt that you can buy a sports ball shirt. And I made a little design that's like a football but it's got baseballs or basketball striping on it. And in the color diversion, it's like baseball colors. I have a beautiful shirt and everybody should go and get it. But touchdown. I was a little bit this is a weird thing. I was a little precious with it. And I actually did not put it into Font Awesome at first. I kept it out of Font  Awesome for a while because like that's mine. I don't want anyone to see my icon. But it does now exist in Font Awesome. So I got over myself. And that icon is there. 

So yeah, I started with sports icons. And then we kind of identified just a bunch of categories that were missing from Font  Awesome and that the community had voted on. And I slowly started every release of Font  Awesome. I'd have a bunch of more little categories, many categories that we'd add with more health icons, stuff like that. And then eventually we kind of hit our the promised goal of how many more categories we were going to add. And they had actually, again, with the promises, the little Kickstarter promises, they had said, we'll do some duotone icons. 

We had to figure out ways to make those icons work with all of our existing tech so that they would work with web fonts and with SVGs. And that would prove to be kind of some creative solutions for how we got that that technology to work. But when I actually started to work on the design of those icons, I think we'd only promised 200 of them or 400. And I was just like, you know what? How am I going to pick the 200 to design? I'm going to pick 200 and someone's going to want the 201st icon that we don't have. So I was just like, OK, I'm just going to do, I kind of just did them all. I did all of the, however many thousand that we had at that point. I just designed them all the duotone style for that whole batch of icons. And then that kind of started us down the path of saying, OK, if we're going to add another style, it's going to be an icon for icon match. 

So yeah, I designed a bunch of categories, did the duotone style. And then when we started talking about Font Awesome 6, I made the decision, well, with the help of the team, that we were going to do a bit of a redesign for a bunch of the icons because it had started to feel a little bit hodgepodgey in version 5, where because of the constraints of time, like Dave had done the first batch of icons, but he had kind of done a bunch of them pretty quickly. He had helped a bit as much. And then I had added on. I've said this before, but when you design a bunch of icons, you're going to start to develop patterns that you're like, oh, this is the way to deal with this particular thing. And I want to backfill it and go back and redesign all the elements to get that. So I had all these ideas in my head. And the thousandth icon I designed in Font Awesome 5 was following slightly different sets of rules than Dave started out with at the beginning of Font  Awesome 5. So Font Awesome 6 was a chance to kind of go in, look at everything holistically, take the lessons we had learned, and have another go at it and try and make things a little bit more consistent, follow a little bit more of some consistent patterns. And so that's what Font Awesome 6 was. And I ended up redesigning a whole ton of icons. And Noah's kind of dealing with that now with the sharp icons, where he's coming up with some rules and stuff. And what's really interesting is that, and kind of nice, is because while we're designing the sharp icons in Figma, we've also made the decisions to go in and redraw the classic icon, so the existing Font  Awesome 6 icon styles in Figma as well. 

And that's giving us the chance to kind of make some of those tweaks that we otherwise wouldn't have made. And with a single-stroked line in Font  Awesome 5, it actually didn't have a fully rounded end cap. It was kind of more just like slightly rounded, squared off. It was just sitting in this weird place between sharp and rounded. And with the sharp icons now here, we have the opportunity to kind of make a little bit more of a differentiation between the two, between the classic icons and the sharp icons. So as we're bringing them into Figma, we're going in and correcting a few of those things.

And Noah's fixing some of the mistakes that I made when I first designed Font  Awesome 6. And I think it's all for the better. So when we're done with sharp, when we fully released Font  Awesome Sharp, Font  Awesome Classic will be all the better for it and will be even better than it was when we started. Do you guys have any tips for folks that are just getting started on designing icons? Yeah, back off. This is our yard. Actually, no, if you're interested, reach out. Seriously, if you want to get started

26:27 Jory: in icon design, we might need some help. Noah, do you want an intern? Noah wants an intern. 

Noah: I mean, I drink a lot of coffee, so I will take it.

26:41 Jory: No, that's not what interns are. That's not their only. I mean, if they offer to get you coffee, it's okay. But really, we want to teach people how to become better designers and…

Noah: Right. Yes, that's what I put in the door of the design industry. I call icons coffee. That's what I meant. 

Jory: Oh, coffee icons. Yeah. Yeah. Understood. This is the most cliche answer in the world, Matt, but design icons. Yeah. Design icons. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just make stuff. And I think that one of the cool things about Figma is that they have this great community, both people who talk and talk about Figma and whatnot, but they have actually in Figma, the app itself, they have a community section, and that's where people can post a bunch of files. And the plugins exist there, people's plugins that they're sharing out. And so there are a bunch of icon sets that exist there. One of Noah's icon sets, Chunk, is there as well. And I would highly recommend go and download those and kind of like take a peek behind the curtain and see how things are constructed, play around with it, and make your own icons. Noah, I'm going to plug him again, but he's got a great little Figma file for kind of building an icon set and kind of showing you some of the basics of icon design.

28:03 Noah: I'm basically just echoing Jory, but yeah, exactly. I would look at other designers that you admire, what they're doing, then dissect their work. I mean, that's really how I learned the ins and outs of icon design back when I was a product designer mostly, was needing to make some icons for a medical application that matched Google's material icons. And so it was basically me sitting down and dissecting what made material material, and kind of combing through all of those, what made them look consistent, what rules there were when they embed them, and trying to figure out why. And that goes a long way towards kind of developing your eye for noticing inconsistencies and when things don't quite mesh in your own work. 

Well, there's a great Ira Glass piece that I can't remember the name of right now that talks a lot about the development of artistic taste and maybe having an eye for when things look good and when they don't, but not being able to articulate or dissect it or know how to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. For me, that went a long way towards figuring out the kind of visual vocabulary of talking about and figuring out why things didn't work in my own work and also developing a better eye for spotting problems and when noticing when things are working.

29:35 Jory: Yeah, that's a great piece. I know exactly the piece here you're talking about with the Ira Glass quote. And I think a key piece of that and tying it to just make stuff is you're going to make things that aren't going to be up to your standards. And you're going to make things that maybe you think look good and are great and then you three months down the line, a year down the line, are going to be like, oh, that doesn't, I don't like that anymore. I mean, I look back at some of my early icon designs. I even look back at the icon designs I was doing when I was first hired at Font  Awesome and that's part of the reason I wanted to design Font  Awesome 6 was like, you know, I'm better. I am better at my craft now than I was when I joined the Font  Awesome team and that is solely a result of spending time on icon design and working through it and it's just thousands and thousands of hours, you know, you're going to get better at something. So yeah, that's again, it's cliched, but it's cliched because it's kind of true. Because it's true.

30:50 Matt: Do either of you guys remember when you started to notice that Font  Awesome icons were sort of in the mix of things and that they were doing great work?

30:59 Jory: I don't know how to answer that question, Matt, when I became aware. And I don't know if you'd like my answer. I mean, why? Well, I got annoyed because I was seeing them everywhere and I was seeing them. Those aren't my icons. And I was an icon designer, I was like, I want my icons to be everywhere. And, you know, the truth is Font  Awesome became ubiquitous because it was open source and we're still open source. We still have an excellent free version that has, you know, even more icons than ever. But that it was open source and it was in the early days of kind of of using web fonts for icons and use and, you know, there are all sorts of arguments about whether web fonts are appropriate or not for icons. And the simple answer is that sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. We're still named, we're named Font  Awesome because that was our name originally and because that's kind of what people know us as. But we have all sorts of different ways to use our icons and the web, you know, the font version is only one way. And the web font version is only one way. We have awesome ligatures in our OTF files that you use in desktop apps and like that we use in Figma every day for things. So, yeah, I mean, I can't point to when I became aware of Font  Awesome per se, but it was certainly, you know, it was a long time ago and I would see them everywhere. And, you know, it was going to sound bad, but like one of my, you know, I wanted to make better icons in Font  Awesome. And that's, I'm thrilled that I'm here. And I don't say that in a way that like, I think the old icons were bad. I think that, you know, the goal of like kind of wanting to constantly make better things. Like I want to make better icons than we currently have in Font  Awesome. Like I just want that, you know, there are all sorts of things and decisions we've made in the past. And they're like, okay, we can improve on that. We can improve on that. We can get better. We can get better. So, yeah, it kind of became a thing where I get to now look at things and be like, oh, those are our icons. And, you know, it's kind of nice to be able to take a little bit of ownership over, you know, Font  Awesome version four and version three, even though I had nothing to do with the designs and being like, that's part of, you know, those being out in the world and those, you know, existing on when you renew your passport on whatever all over the place. Like that's, that's why Noah and I have jobs right now. And, or these particular jobs, I should say. And, so I'm grateful that they exist. And, you know, I think that, I mean, there's some icons in Font  Awesome four that I'm like, those are really good. We should design, you know, we should adopt that design again, or I don't know. I'm constantly happy with what we're doing, constantly unhappy, constantly, I don't know, I just live in a fugue state. I never know what I think about things.

34:18 Noah: So you're a human. 

Jory: What? Yeah, yeah.

34:25 Matt:  Thanks for listening into podcast awesome. A special thank you to Jory and Noah for coming on the show. If you like what you've heard, please give us a rating and review and share this episode with your friends. This episode was produced and edited by yours truly, Matt Johnson. The Font  Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin, and audio mastering was done by Chris ends at lemon productions.