[00:00:00]

JW: I feel like there's a process of, like, demystification going on again, where, like, designers are, realizing, there's actually a bunch of this stuff that I can do myself, or I can learn myself, or that I'm not totally at the mercy of, somebody who's more technical than I am, doing that work.

And so I'm able to kinda go on and push the button and learn how something is made and, rebuild it at a low level. And I think that that's where you start to see, design languages emerge again, where, like, things have become homogenous for a while, and I feel like we're in a place where, maybe it'll break back out a little bit.

Welcome to Podcast Awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the Font Awesome team

Today we are joined by Josh Williams, and he's been designing icons since before it was really [00:01:00] a job. 

Josh went on to become one of the most respected icon and identity designers working today

He helped shape the Font Awesome and Web Awesome logos, and he just designed Mosaic, a brand new icon pack for Font Awesome Pro that's not really like anything that we've shipped before

In this episode, we talk about where Mosaic came from, what it looks like when a designer has genuine creative freedom, why everything on the web started looking the same, and whether that's finally starting to change. Josh is thoughtful and he's funny. He has a lot of opinions about geometric shapes, and his wife owns a taco shop in Napa, so who doesn't like tacos?

So stick around. This is a good one. ladies and gentlemen, Podcast Awesome presents to you Josh Williams.

Jory: I gotta fanboy a little bit, because way back when, I used to... I had this weird thing. Well, I think RSS [00:02:00] readers were a thing at the time, but I didn't really use them. I would, have a bookmark list of websites that I liked and, and people who would do blog posts and stuff and, or, or resources that were released and stuff, and I would just...

every morning before work, I would just... Or d- not before work, during work, when I sat down at my desk, I would open it up. Yeah, it was working. It was research. And I would, like, literally just, you know, do Tab click every single link, and it would open up all these browser windows.

And I would just go down the list of, like, all these different ones and, like Authentic Boredom and Simplebits and, you had Firewheel Design, right?

JW: 13th

Jory: that Firewheel?

JW: like way after

Jory: No, no, but I would... like, the logos and the, the app icons and stuff, I just... One of my early websites that I designed was, like, a complete rip of yours

JW: That makes

Jory: to design, like the structure and stuff.

So, huge inspiration on this front, and it was really fun to actually get to meet you in person a few years [00:03:00] ago. 

and then Matt, I don't know if you know, but, this gentleman here is very, very responsible for the new versions of our logos, 

Matt: Nice

Jory: that we brought you on board when we were doing the Web Awesome branding, and that quickly kinda snowballed into updating the Font Awesome mark.

and you obviously presented us with some awesome things that, like, we were probably a little too scared to fully go down the path of.

JW: Someday.

Jory: but yeah, someday, you know, certainly on the typography front. But the marks, I think the marks are pretty darn close to what we kind of

JW: Where it

Jory: landed on as far as the simple flag and crown.

So, yeah, so we owe you a lot.

JW: I love collaborating with y'all, and like I said, this is one of the most fun teams to work with. So, thank you for letting me be a small part

Jory: Yeah, for sure, man. 

and then the other reason you're here is the, we, I think by the time this episode releases, it will probably be out to the public, but you, designed an icon pack for us

JW: Yes.

Jory: our Pro [00:04:00] Plus icons

JW: this one? I can't even remember now. What are we releasing this as?

Jory: Ah, we may have never told you. No, we, I think we landed on Mosaic

JW: That's very nice. I like it. Yeah,

Jory: Yeah.

JW: that too. It

Jory: Yeah.

JW: It's good

Jory: Yeah. So yeah, you gotta sit with that. I know you, you can't ingest it quite yet, but that's where we've been living with that for a little while now behind the scenes. but yeah, it's a super cool icon pack, so I can't wait for folks to use it.

JW: That's awesome

Matt: one of the questions I have for you, Jory, is that, when you brought Josh on board, what were you hoping for in the commission? Was there anything that Josh delivered that was surprising for you or, disappointing or

Jory: It's all surprising.

Matt: Just

Jory: 'cause we've had a few of these conversations about the small batch Pro+ icons, and, what I love about them so much is that they're green fields. We try and, let the designer have full control over coming up with a unique style, something maybe we haven't seen before.

[00:05:00] and I know that also can be some pressure and maybe can, be a little too much freedom. But, I think I was just like, "Do whatever you want."

JW: I remember at the time when you approached me, I actually haven't done one in a year, but I've had this letterpress, calendar project that has these emoji icons, on them. it's gonna come back this year, I promise. 

Matt: Nice

JW: uni-calendar, thank you. um, when, yeah, when you approached me about doing this icon pack, so the calendar itself is letterpress, and so it has icons on it. they're about, you know, a half inch or so, on the letterpress calendar. But due to the limitations of that, the style for that was, intentionally designed to be kind of this mid-century-ish, you know, very, highly geometric sort of, you know, triangles and circles and basic shapes were, the construct of everything. And so I think a lot of that kinda carried into what became this mosaic style, you know, for the icon pack as

Jory: [00:06:00] Yeah

JW: there for sure

Jory: they're-- it's like the Uni Calendar... I mean, a lot of them are, like your interpretation of emoji, right? Like a kind of a very, simplified... I literally have all of them, Matt.

Matt: Nice

Jory: and I was so sad that there wasn't one for twenty--

JW: 26. Yeah,

Jory: and five.

twenty-five.

JW: it'll come back

Jory: But like,

Matt: Oh, that's awesome

Jory: and then they come with stickers and stuff you can place in specific... I don't know if you-- It's probably not registering in the camera. But, a bunch of the days are just replaced with these cool glyphs. And so, yeah, Mosaic is kind of born from that, right?

The, the new style has kind of roots in that style. so yeah, pretty awesome

Matt: we talked to Laura B a few months ago and, Vic Bell prior to that. I think it was Laura that was on... She's like, "Oh, great. 

I get to work with my friends, and, I'm just sort of given, free rein to create what I want." And she was like, she had this moment where it was like, "Oh, I only have, minimal constraints, and I'm not... I don't know what I [00:07:00] wanna do yet." And she talked about how she had a little bit of a crisis of like, "Oh, gosh." how did that feel to you for Jory or, and/or Noah to say like, "Hey, do what you want"? Like, did that feel exciting or freeing, or did that make you feel anxious, or what was your process there?

JW: green field for me has always been, fairly exciting. I think the trick is, you have to find, some edge, something that's like what's the thread that's gonna hold all these together or, that you're gonna set your style on and, we can talk a little bit, about like, like old, macOS icon scene in a bit if we want to 'cause I think that's where a lot of my roots came from.

But I've always kind of found, you know, kind of an edge along, yeah, this, like, highly geometric sort of, that if you just say, "Hey, Josh, go do your thing," that's kind of my shtick, for better or for worse, you know? And so I'm comfortable with that. and so for me, it was I, I'd been doing this [00:08:00] calendar for, I don't know, five or six years at the time that Jory approached me.

So it, for me, I was like, "Okay, this gives me an opportunity to take something that was kind of a, a made-for-print style," modify it a little bit because it's, you know, screen and has different technical requirements. I kind of have that same sort of like these are very simplistic, geometric.

I think even the Mosaic name, it kind of implies, how you take these pieces and put them together to create a picture, and I think that's a lot of how the icons came about, of like what are these kind of reusable geometric elements that, are used in this one icon and they, reappear in this other icon kind of in a different way. but they again tie it together. And, and I don't know. That, that's just kind of me, and I'm, uh, for better or for worse, old enough in my career that I kinda know what I like, and so I just, I am I into that stuff.

Jory: Yeah. 

Matt: totally.

JW: Laura's 

Matt: So I gotta know...

JW: I had a chance

to work with

Matt: oh yeah

JW: once on a project. It's been many years [00:09:00] now, but just an incredibly talented illustrator, and I love her work, so, um, yeah.

Matt: Mm-hmm.

Jory: Yeah. and the pack she did for us is like,

JW: fire.

Jory: it was a showcase piece. we launched with it 'cause it was so nice.

Matt: Yeah

Jory: not saying yours isn't nice. We just like, we, you know, we had to hold some back 'cause we need to,

JW: the fun. I get it.

Matt: so Josh, I gotta know, I read somewhere that early on you were, like, replacing trashcan icons on Mac OS 7 as a teenager, and that you nearly got fired, from a job. What was it?

For system resource editing?

JW: so

Matt: what's the story there?

JW: had to have been maybe 15 or 16 at the time. and I had actually, I was kind of an internship was working for, our church. They had a media department. so, this is like Early '90s megachurch, and they had a media department. This is actually a time, too, like before digital screens, like a lot of the work was output to slides.

So this is [00:10:00] crazy town, you know, actually like the physical film. but you know, I worked in the media department there and had gotten into resource editing and, and if you recall, it used to be all like, you could just get info on a folder, and it would open up the folder dialogue, and you could select the icon and just, Command copy, Command paste, and you could put new icons onto any folder.

So that was a thing. Like you'd go into Photoshop, I'm gonna draw a new icon, copy it, open the Finder, get info, select the icon, Command V, and you put a new icon in there, except the trash can. And so you could edit all these icons, and change your folder icons and change app icons and everything else. But for whatever reason, like you could not change the trash can icon, and that was the cool one because it was one icon if it was empty, and then if you drug stuff into it and put trash in it, then the icon changed, and now it had a different state, and so now it has a different state that it's full.

and maybe that's why you couldn't just copy and paste it 'cause it actually had [00:11:00] states to the icon. 

So the only way you could edit the trash can icon was to actually do system-level resource editing. So you'd, open up ResEdit and go digging into wherever the resource file was for the trash can, and it had two resources, one for empty and one for full.

and you'd actually have to like edit out the artwork there. So you're no longer in the Finder. You're down a couple layers. and of course, once you're in there and you're like, "Wow, look at... There's all this other stuff that I can edit

Matt: Uh-oh.

JW: as well," and like, "What else can I do?" And it's like, oh, I, here's, the, you know, the, the, the image files for, you know, for the, folder win- like the, the curves on the windows and the close and the, you know, minimize buttons, and you start finding all this stuff. It's like, "Well, can I edit that, too?"

And at some point I took, I took the bit too far and like l- literally just kernel panicked and, you know, the machine just boop, you know? and that was that. And like [00:12:00] it... If you recall, like you would start a Mac up, and it would give you the flashing question mark on the disk. It was like, "I don't have a startup," you know.

"There's no startup, system here, so I don't know where to go." and basically, I did something, forced a reboot, came back up, and I had, flashing question mark, and it was one of those like Oh, shit. so you have to go to your boss and like, "Hey, man, the Mac is toast."

And, yeah, it was, like, a weekend of, like... Fortunately, like, I don't think we lost any files, but yeah, I had to rebuild the system, and I'm sure it, it

Matt: Wow

JW: a day of his time to go in there and kind of, set the thing back up. And yeah, I was given a very, like, "Hey," love your creativity," and, it was very thoughtful.

but, like, "If you do this again," yeah, like, "you can't be here." Like, "This isn't gonna

Matt: Yeah,

JW: So,

Jory: Yeah

Matt: and you learn something along the way. what a invaluable lesson.

JW: there, I think it was, like, [00:13:00] after OS 7 came out, then you got a ClickFor and there was, like... Kaleidoscope Themes was, like, a thing. so that was like

Jory: Oh yeah

JW: do all this stuff but do it in a way that was, safe. And so you install this, pro- product, Kaleidoscope, and it would just skin... this is like Winamp skins, Cal Skins on the Mac. And yeah, you just re- you redo all the... make it look not like gray chrome and make it, black and yellow bumblebee or whatever you wanted to do, and that was kind of

Jory: Yeah

JW: how I got into icons.

Jory: That was a different time, man. and I think there's probably something universal with, you know, designers or developers who want to tinker with that stuff. 

I mean, I remember you, I, I, was it My- MySpace where you could kind of break into the CSS there and, update your own, kind of write your own theme, and, like, if you, knew just enough, you could, even you know, change how many friends it looked like you had and all sorts of things like that

JW: I met so [00:14:00] many of the people that I ultimately ended up working with. And they say, half of your success, if not more, in this industry is just the people you know or the people you get to work with. And a- at

Matt: For sure

JW: Kaleidoscope Icon theme is how I met, a lot of the guys who were at Icon Factory at the time, and, so kinda got involved in that community.

then you mentioned MySpace, and it was through that. There was a young designer at the time. I was early 20s, but he was 15, 16 at the time, a guy named Keegan Jones. And Keegan was, like, infamous for, writing the CSS that would strip the ads out of your MySpace page.

So not only he customized it, like, it was like, "Oh, Here's what you could do to, like, tear all the..." You know. And basically it made it look like you had your own custom designed blog, but here it was running on MySpace, and of course, I think he got a cease and desist out of that, and they put the kibosh down.

But it made, Keegan [00:15:00] internet famous for a hot minute, and ended up becoming, you know, someone that I've, collaborated off and on with for, my entire career now. So those were fun. You know, it was a fun

Jory: Yeah

JW: at the time, so

Matt: That's very cool.

Jory: Yep

Matt: you're, making friends on... It's so funny, you think back with Facebook. "Hey, guys, remember Friendster?"

JW: Right. Yeah. The

Matt: But you see folks, like, in your field or whatever, and you're like, "Wow, look what they did with their profile. Interesting." And then you make connections, like, "How did you do that?"

You know? And sharing information and, uh, is just so cool

Jory: hackiness of it all.

Matt: Yep

Jory: I mean, my, this is not nearly as interesting, but, like, I would, probably my start in icon design years and years and years and years and years ago was prob- when I was a teenager, and it was just kind of trying to break open some, like, source files and things on, and look at l- look at how these icons were created.

Or I remember even tracing, like, not tracing, but, you know, staring at, like, a Game Boy and then on the computer in, like, [00:16:00] Mac Paint and,

clicking and trying to, like, copy, like, a little Batman icon or whatever to try and, like, duplicate it, 

JW: I think that 

Jory: Mac Paint and yeah

JW: that era of something apart and rebuilding it wa- was really, really, you know, instrumental to a lot of us who, again, saw it as a hobby. a- and then it miraculously turned out to be, you know, be a profession, you know?

And which was, I guess, somewhat of a, a surprise. I think it's one of the, like, the interesting and exciting things right now, i- is that there is a bit of, like, a, a tinker, you know, culture that's come, that feels like it's come back around. And some of that, you know, I, I don't wanna, like, fully lay at the feet of like, oh, well, AI is enabling designers to do what they haven't been able to do before.

I feel like there's a process of, like, demystification going on again, where, like, designers are, realizing, there's actually a bunch of this stuff that I can do myself, or I can learn myself, or that I'm [00:17:00] not totally at the mercy of, somebody who's more technical than I am, doing that work.

And so I'm able to kinda go on and push the button and learn how something is made and, rebuild it at a low level. And I think that that's where you start to see, design languages emerge again, where, like, things have become homogenous for a while, and I feel like we're in a place where, maybe it'll break back out a little bit.

I think it's, like, it's an interesting time right now. 

even something that's fascinating, like what you're doing with the icon packs. at the root of Font Awesome, you had this situation where, early days, like, okay, there's this recognition that, everyone's needs the same 60 icons or however many it is.

So here, let's just do, like, a really clean set that, you know, everybody can use. And there's extreme value that comes out of, like, something like that. And it has a moment of, like, solving a problem and meeting a need for a lot of folks. And then again, you fast-forward a couple years, now [00:18:00] everybody, in- including me at the last company I was at, like, uses, um, Awesome through a lot of their stuff.

and again, it meets a need, but then also you have this like, well, it all also looks the same, and there's good and bad that comes with that. or I say good, bad, that's not the w- right way to frame it. There's just, you know... But there's, an opportunity to, again, say, "Well, how do you make it look different?"

Or, "How do you, put something in here that has, like, a personality or a point of view?" and we're starting, I think, maybe be in a place where we see a little bit more of that again.

Jory: there's kind of these weird cycles, right? I think part of the reason Font Awesome was successful originally was because there was such a scattershot approach to icons specifically on the web. And like, yes, they were there, but someone would, do a few, and you'd grab some from here, you'd grab some from there, and you'd kind of piece them together into one thing.

And Font Awesome gave you a single source of truth for that, as it were, to kind of use as a basis. [00:19:00] And, but you're right that, its goal was to kind of be default and to kind of be, quote-unquote, boring. To be like, "This will work. This will just work, and, you know, it'll look nice, but it's not gonna...

You know, it'll be a little invisible in the right way."

JW: right.

and so when you have

Jory: yeah. But now, but y-

JW: do something that's like, okay, here's... We take the framework, but we put something with a different point of view or a different, perspective on it, I think is really delightful. 

Matt: Yeah. I'm thinking about something that Vic Bell said, Jory. she was kinda on some of the similar stuff of like, for a while it felt like things were... And again, it's not good or bad, it's just sort of the way things sort of flow. But things were feeling a little bit homogenous, like very precise and clean, and all these sites had a sameness to them.

And then she was reflecting on, for herself, like going back to the core of what she loved about icon design, which was like when she was a kid, she liked drawing tiny pictures a notebook, and there was sort of this tactile [00:20:00] aspect. you kinda see this flow of like folks in the creative space where things kinda come and go, right?

And now it seems like it's going back towards, oh, like kinda more whimsy or people thinking about physical things and how that can be represented on the screen. it's just really cool to see people play with that and see new, things and new styles develop. It's really fun to watch.

JW: Very much so

Jory: what I've liked recently with some of the AI stuff and, and obviously it's a very compli- complicated subject, and people have all sorts of feelings around it. But o-o-one of the positives, is I feel at least from a code perspective and, and, um, a product building perspective, is there's a little bit more room for play and for being messy because my design process is messy.

Like, if I'm designing an interface, you know, the way I used to do it, which was in Figma or something like that, and I'd be moving stuff around and trying something, seeing how it looks, and I'm kind of s- doing something [00:21:00] similar to that, but, but now it's, like, actually functioning.

And so y-you have these ideas for things, and you can try it out for relatively,

JW: Yeah, low cost.

Jory: time cost. if it works, awesome. If it doesn't, try something else, and you're not spending weeks, which, is sometimes hard to, come up with a fully fledged idea and exactly how you want it to work and then hand it off to someone to build and then be like,

JW: Right. Right

Jory: "No."

you know, so now you can kind of, like, get a rough draft and fiddle with it a lot quicker, which is super fun

JW: yeah, I think that, I'm trying to think. Well, it's interesting, a couple of things I've seen lately. the latest Airbnb update where they, have these, very, 3D rendered sort of icons at the top of the navigation that kinda throw back to, like, your,

Jory: Yeah

JW: macOS sort of, you know, look.

and then Claude itself kinda has, like, this tinkery sort of aesthetic to it with its, warm grays and the, the orange robot that kind of, makes you think of a [00:22:00] different, kind of a different era of making. I think that, there's a little bit of a pushback on, like, even the macOS Apple aesthetic that we've, kind of all been living, with for a long time and just feeling like it's, constrictive in some ways.

And you've see some people pushing, you know, for some alternatives there. and so I, I do. I don't know where this, like... know where this lands us, but again, the cost of experimentation is a lot lower right now. And so that part feels like, you'll see at least people push on things a little bit more.

Jory: So what are you, what are you doing right now? What's, what's your, uh,

JW: Yeah. So

Jory: what's your day-to-day?

JW: I, for a minute I was doing, icons for people like Font Awesome and brands and logos and the like. obviously my background, is in that. I went in-house with a client for a number of years and spent some time, at a identity security company.

So kind of interesting [00:23:00] work around, helping ensure that the folks at your company only have access to the things that they're supposed to have access to. we sold that, earlier this year to, ServiceNow, which is a big sort of, you know, Salesforce-size, you know, kinda company.

And, I recently left and I guess, this will probably be, by the time this drops, so I'll talk about it now. But I'm actually going back to join Keegan, uh, at Instagram, and I'm going to be, working on a kinda labs team there, which is where things like the new Threads product has come out of.

There's a new instance product. So kinda these

Jory: Yeah

JW: new ways for people to, communicate and connect with their friends through kinda like the Instagram ecosystem, Obviously, like now, Instagram has, become something that's much evolved from what it was when it started.

And I think the network is there. It's one of the strongest creative networks that exists, but I think there's a lot of opportunity to ask like, "Well, what can you do with that?" [00:24:00] And so, when Keegan asked if I was interested maybe, you know, jam with him again, I was like, "This is a really, really, really awesome opportunity."

Jory: Awesome. Congrats

JW: my, I'm cleaning my office right now and trying to take care of a few loose ends before,

Jory: Yeah

JW: back to the large social media company. But, again, grateful to work with some of the most creative people that I know there

Jory: Yeah, that's awesome. are you gonna be doing, more, product development work or actually pushing pixels or all of the above 

JW: like you said, all these roles are kind of, blending and blurring now. And so hopefully I'll, keep my hands dirty on all the sides. my hobby project is still, I mentioned my wife has a, a restaurant, I spend, nights and weekends doing, branding and website and whatever for her.

So that's a lot of fun, and it's a completely different aesthetic, to be designing for, like, a physical space and its things. so yeah, That's a lot of [00:25:00] fun, And so, I enjoy the balance of these things.

Jory: Yeah, For sure. I mean, there's something so satisfying about a physical object when you live primarily in a digital world that,

JW: you

Jory: you know. I mean, I'm sure that's why you did this thing,

JW: it is. It is something, you know, you can see like the, the

Jory: Yeah

JW: printer behind me, you know, to roll large menus or, comps or posters or whatever off of that is, it's, fun to have something that's like fairly tactile. So it's great.

Jory: Yeah. 

 Thanks to Josh for hanging out with us today on the podcast.

And if you've ever spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why a trash can has two states, Josh is your kind of guy. We covered a lot of ground today, Mosaic, the origins of Josh's style, the weird creative moment we're all living through right now with AI, and we didn't even get to everything.

So Josh is coming back for a part two episode, and, uh, it may even be better than the first [00:26:00] one 

if you wanna check out the Mosaic icon pack, you can head over to fontawesome.com and you know the drill. If you liked this episode, you can subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss part two And per usual, Podcast Awesome is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin.

The music interstitials were composed by Zach Malm, and video editing help comes to us from Mr. Isaac Chase. And, uh, you know the rest. You know what to do. Go make something awesome. [00:27:00]