[00:00:00] Which to be fair, they could create bad icons with those power transforms already- Fair ... for generations of Font Awesome. Yeah. We just now made it much easier to create bad icons. Yeah. And good ones. And good ones. That's the key. Right. That's the key. Keep, let's keep telling ourselves that

That's Mike, and you know, he's not wrong. Welcome back to Podcast Awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the Font Awesome team. My name is Matt Johnson, I'm your host, and today's a rare one. We've actually got Mike, Ed, and Jory all in the same room to talk about the Icon Wizard, the new and improved one, which just launched.

And it's a genuinely big upgrade. You can mix and match icons across styles. There's way more modifiers and elements, a user blender for building your own custom [00:01:00] characters, and power transforms that now work in web fonts, not just SVG. And we'll get into where the original wizard came from, what changed under the hood, and why the team handed a lot more creative control over to you, bad icons and all.

Uh, we're also running an Icon Wizard contest through September 7th, so stick around. You're definitely going to want to enter the contest. All right, let's get into it. Well, thanks, fellas, for coming on Podcast Awesome. Mike, Ed, and Jory, we've got everybody in the same room, which is, uh, kind of a rarity on these podcasts where we can get everybody scheduled, so thanks for taking some time.

And we are talking today about the, the new Icon Wizard, yay, which just launched last week. And, uh, we've had a lot of fun including the community in the, uh, the wizardry [00:02:00] process, and I think we're still running the Icon Wizard contest, if I'm not mistaken. Yep. When does that run until? Um, I think the 7th of September.

So the Icon Wizard contest, can somebody tell me a little bit about that? When we started, uh, working on the updates to the new Icon Wizard, um, I- I really like the creativity that it gives, um, and I really wanted to see what other people were doing with it. And, you know, I can... Sometimes I, when I'm working the help tickets or whatever, I'll see, uh, what people do with the Icon Wizard now, the, the old Icon Wizard.

Um, but this is gonna be, uh, the new one is, like, bigger and better in, in almost every way, and I kinda wanted to see what everybody did. So, uh, I just had this idea of putting together a little contest of having people actually submit it, and then [00:03:00] putting those icons together in a gallery so that we could all, everyone could enjoy them.

Some great ones in there. Yep. Yeah. Nice. So this is, you can enter the contest. Yep. You just need, just need to be a customer, pay- paying customer. Yeah. Free users can play around with the wizard, but, uh, they won't be able to create icons that go into the gallery. Is that right? Yeah. Yep, yep. So become a paid customer, people.

Come on. You gotta enter the p- the, the contest. I mean, that's really what we're trying to say here. Um, any favorites that stand out for you guys? Well, I just sent an email with one of my favorites, which is somebody basically created an icon, an iconic rendition of Starry Night, with all the little swirly skies and the little village, and um, uh, it shows an immense amount of creativity there.

Yeah. And then lots of people are using the, uh, [00:04:00] what we used to call the user blender, which is now just a simple tab in the Icon Wizard, so you can swap out different heads and bodies, uh, f- for, to make the, your own custom user icons, and so people are having fun with that. Um, yeah, I don't know. There are a ton of really, really fun ones.

Yeah. We'll put some up on the YouTube version of the podcast to kinda cycle through the, uh, some of the ones on the gallery. I was looking at it yesterday. There's some really fun ones. I like, uh, the creative use of certain objects or other body parts as heads. You know? Mm-hmm. Like a hand as a head. Uh, that kind of stuff is pretty cool.

Um, yeah, a lot of great entries. Any, any ones that stand out to you guys? Saw a centaur in there. Yep. Of heads and bodies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, I really like, there's a one, it's like a potted cactus- Yeah, yeah ... where they took, uh, some things and put it together. It's, it's well designed. Yeah. It's awesome. For sure.[00:05:00]

We've had a podcast about this going back to the, uh, several years now from the beginning of the podcast where we talked about Farts Font Awesome Reusable Tidbits. Uh, which was what it- And shapes And shapes. And shapes. Yep. Uh, since we're talking plural. Um, so this project all, goes all the way back to that idea, and then it became the Icon Wizard, and we were so close to calling it Icon Farts, which some of us are a little disappointed that honestly it wasn't called that.

But Icon Wizard, you're welcome. But if we go back, both Ed, uh, Mike, you, you guys both worked on that project, um, early on. Is that correct? Yes. And I think, uh, was Brian a part of sort of the original idea behind this going way back? Yeah. [00:06:00] Brian wrote the original pitch for, for, uh, that, that still lives, I think, in base camp for Farts.

And the... I mean, the first version of the Wizard was, it was a modifier tool. It was literally just built so you could... We had all these icons that had little pluses in the corner or, or gears in the corner, and, um, we had requests to add those to different icons, and all these other one. And if we answered every one of those requests, our, our library was just gonna balloon with all of these different icons, which were really only a very, a very simple variation on the, on the base.

And so the first version of the Wizard, which was kind of inspired by that Farts idea, was just slapping a modifier on the corner of every icon. And, um, what's funny is you said it's, it's hard to schedule to get us all in the same room. I think the last time the f- four of us did a podcast together was about that original Icon Wizard, and at that point, we actually, we were l- like physically in the same room.

[00:07:00] Wasn't that what- Mm-hmm ... we recorded one at the Snuggle? I think so. Yep. Yep. We were at a Snuggle. Yep. Um, and I, I mean, I'll, I'll hand the floor over in a minute, but, but what's really cool to... What I think is really cool about the original Icon Wizard and this new Icon Wizard is that they both were seeds of work that started as what we call Snactivities at the Snuggles.

So they are projects that we kind of had these ideas for, that for whatever reason, because maybe they were so amorphous in our heads, like we couldn't get them on the schedule for, for regular work, um, 'cause they were kind of just proof of concept ideas. And, and that time period during the Snuggles, let's just, just be, play and, and explore things.

And so, um, the first time Mike and Ed kind of tackled that first version of the Wizard, and then, um, this, this last Snuggle we had, you did the second version and made it even better. From the original Wizard to the [00:08:00] current one, what have you guys changed and/or improved? I wanna add a little more backstory before going to the The recent changes, 'cause there was a- Yeah

historical provocation for me, even I think separate from the farts, uh, proposal. Um, and that provocation was, what if we could do power transforms in our web fonts, or just in our fonts? So power transforms is a feature that, starting in Font Awesome 5, has only been available in our SVG technology. We have two, more than two, but mainly two significant different tech stacks for, um, making our icons work, and one of them is web fonts or, or fonts on desktop, and the other is SVGs, and, um, especially the SVGs on the web, which uses JavaScript, and means there's some much more capabilities there.

The power transforms let you do things like layering and masking and adding the little number of unread emails over the [00:09:00] email envelope icon, and all that sort of stuff, which you now see that you can do that with the Icon Wizard. But you've been able to do that since Font Awesome 5 if you knew how to write the JavaScript and, and put together things just so, um, with our JavaScript API.

But those designs that you can make with that couldn't be turned into web font glyphs and compiled into a web font. So there was always this difference of what your capability options were. If you're using SVGJS, you've got a whole nother batch of tools available to you versus if you're using our web font CSS tech.

So the question was, what if we could just do power transforms in our web fonts? That's what actually got me going. Um, and so that is what's happening with the Icon Wizard. Any creation that you make does end up being just an SVG that can be added to your kit, and then it's usable in, in either tech stack.

Mm-hmm. So there was the ability to do all that, all [00:10:00] those functions, and now we just made it gooder. More- Yeah. Basically. It's more, it's more magical. It's magical. You just wave that magic wand and, uh, there you go. You can- Well, we, we made it good or better, or we made it so that folks, uh, it's a little more user-friendly.

Yeah. They can build it using a, a, you know, an, an actual interface, um, a little tool. And then we have now started supplying folks with more component parts that they can slap together. Um, and I mean, that was my biggest concern with the, with the version two, and w- I'm seeing some of it, but i- in, in the sense that y- um, we have handed over complete control of icon building to folks.

Um, where with the original Icon Wizard, we were very specific where we, we designed the size of the modifiers. We designed the size of the cutouts. We, you know, our team had a lot of [00:11:00] control over that, so if you added something, we knew it was gonna be pixel perfect. It was gonna look good, uh, for the most part.

And we with the new one, we, we've kind of, you know, uh, uh, loosened, loosened the rules a little bit, um, i- which has its pluses and its minuses. And I think that was a trade-off we were willing to make, and with some of the creativity we're seeing in the, in the gallery, you know, that wouldn't be possible had we not done that.

But it also means that, you know, folks can create some pretty bad icons. Um- Yeah. And I can create some pretty bad icons. Um, so- Which to be fair, they could create bad icons with those power transforms already- Fair ... for generations of Font Awesome. Yeah. We just now made it much easier to create bad icons.

Yeah. And good ones. And good ones. That's the key. Right. That's the key. Let's keep telling ourselves that.

Ed, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the, [00:12:00] the original Icon Wizard and sort of the evolution of what it is now, maybe what makes it gooder, uh, uh, easier to use, better to use. Can, can you kind of outline that for us? Oh, sure. Well, let's see. It's been a couple of years, um, and we did get requests, um, about adding new modifiers, about adding new options, about m- being able to move things around a little bit because sometimes people didn't like the positioning of stuff.

And so we took a lot of that feedback, and, uh, we tried to integrate all that stuff in on the new one. The new one allows you to, um, basically mix and match icons from different, uh, styles in our Classic and Sharp styles. It allows you to, um, put together I think about 20, I think you can do 20 different icons altogether, each one on its own layer that you can control the size of, and rotation- Mm

and position on the [00:13:00] canvas. Um, and you can, like, have them, uh, either add or subtract. So you can create all kinds of crazy things with it. But it, it, it now is a more of a full-fledged tool to build icons with. And at the same time, it's also a really fun toy to play with. You can just drop stuff in there and, and see what you can create.

I'm always gonna be like- Top of mind is the novelty aspect and how fun it is, you know? The toy aspect of it, like that that stands out to me, which is its own value and is, like, super fun. What is the pain point for somebody? Is it just simply they don't have the icon that I need? Like, some- somebody comes to the Icon Wizard and they're like, "I have a problem."

"Oh, this is the solution. Thank you, Icon Wizard." What would we say about that? Well, it goes back to the, the original one too, which is that we had all these variations of icons that [00:14:00] were literally the only difference was this little glyph that was in the corner of them. And people would say, "Well, okay, I can get, um, I can add a little pencil to the corner of the, the file icon, but I can't do that on the house icon," or, "I can't do that on the computer icon."

Mm-hmm. And, um, so, so the different states of icons to represent kind of different actions, editing, favoriting, XYZ, instead of us having to build every single one of those variations, which literally becomes millions of different icons, now folks can just come in and make a quick variation. So if they have an icon that, that has a, um, like a remove state and they want to have a little circle X in the corner, they can do that on any one of our icons now.

They can add a slash to any one of our icons now. We don't have to be the arbiters of what goes into the library at that point, um, because that icon may only be useful for one person, and so having, you know, putting it in front of everyone's eyes and forcing it [00:15:00] into some of their libraries doesn't necessarily make sense.

So they have more control over kind of that very simple w- way to create an icon, and now we've just given them more and more options because, like Mike said, you could do things with power transforms that you couldn't do in web fonts. You could do in S- the SVG technology, but not with the web fonts. And now you can, like, you could create separate glyphs for, like, a, a envelope icon.

You could put a little badge in the corner. And with the new Icon Wizard, we have included letters and numbers, too, so you can actually use those and punch those out of the little badge if you want. Um- Mm-hmm ... different file types, you know? We, um... It might even be in the gallery now. I think I made a poo file type.

So- I mean, why wouldn't you? ... you know, whenever you wanna use that, I think that's a great... Yeah. Um. You should always try and use poop if you can. Yeah, you can. Always. Mm-hmm. That's, that's the problem. Most of the icons I create with the Wizard is slapping that poop icon on different things just 'cause I find it so, so funny.

Mm-hmm. [00:16:00] Yeah, and then, then there are just, like, we don't know what people need. So if we... The more tools we can give them to build the icons they need, I think the better. Um, so it becomes really useful, but then also it's just fun to play with. And why not have a little art tool? And wh- yeah, why not do both?

It feels to me like the way that you're describing it, it's, like, more properly an actual design tool. You just have way more Way more flexibility with what you're building instead of just making a minor change to it. You can also, with the new Icon Wizard, do very unexpected things like the Starry Night scene that Jory talked about.

That is a completely different kind of thing than all of the old icon modifiers with the old Icon Wizard. Right. Because with the old ones, basically you know what you're getting. Here's a base icon, and you put a modifier down in this corner, or maybe we upgraded it so you could do it in this corner or this corner.

Basically, you got four options, and then you got [00:17:00] different modifiers for each. But you're not too surprised when you see something come out of the Icon Wizard and it looks like a thing with another thing in the corner. But Starry Night is a different, that's a different kind of creation. They, they leveraged the various capabilities of the wizard to...

It probably used different icons that we wouldn't have thought to be used for this or that, you know, to subtract this part and add that part, and, um, very unexpected things could be made with, uh, add a little creativity and a stroke of that wand. Mm-hmm. And you get to take all of those icons you create and serve them up through our kits and technology so that if you've already, if you're already using Font Awesome, then you can create these amazing things and just use them on your site like you were doing any other icon.

Yep. There's probably all kinds of different tools somebody could be using to customize something or b- or build an icon that's, like, very specific for their need, but then [00:18:00] you're You're going from tool to tool to tool. It's kind of a clunky workflow, whatever. And the Icon Wizard, this is more properly like a design tool, but it's like you can do everything within the wizard itself instead of taking a file and putting it in here and tweaking it and then putting it back into the thing, and you're just doing everything within the wizard itself, which is- It-

seems like it really simplifies the flow, right? It's absolutely a design tool. Yeah. I mean, it is at, at its core, it's, it's kinda simplified the way you create these things from a, um, a user perspective. I mean, behind the scenes, maybe Mike and Ed can talk about that a little bit more about how technically we're doing it.

But it is duplicating what, like Noah and I actually do when we are creating these icons. Uh, we, you know, we use Figma, and we, we have a component file that has all these bits and pieces of certain icons. Like I, I mentioned the file icon before, we have a lot of variations of the file icon, and so instead [00:19:00] of having to redraw that icon every single time we create a variation of it, we have this core file icon, and we pull it in as a component, and then we add these different things on top of it, and we swap them out, and then we export that into a thing.

Mm-hmm. This is doing that same thing, but I don't have to do it in, in, uh, my design tool. I can use the Icon Wizard for it. Um, we actually had a customer write in the other day. Um, I had asked a question about, like, what icons are Font Awesome missing? And they said, "Oh, there's one that what you're missing, which is a simple, like, rectangle that has one, two, three in it.

That is just so I can use it to indicate, like, a number field. But you don't have it yet." And I was like, "Oh, you're right, that would be a great icon to have." And, and I thought to myself, "Wait, could I just build this with the wizard?" This is before we'd released it. And I was like, "I'm gonna see if I can build it with the wizard," and I did.

I just threw our numbers in. They were sized correctly. I ha- I had the, the, the rectangle. I downloaded the SVG, and I sent it to him, and I said, "Hey, will this work in the meantime?" He's like, "Oh, that's perfect." [00:20:00] And so I, I used- Awesome ... our tool to hand off an icon to a client instead of, you know, using Figma or something.

Yeah. And it was amazing. Oh, that's great, man. Yeah, like you... A designer being able to say, like, "I have a particular workflow. Okay, I'm working with icons right now. Um, in the past I might, you know, use these different tools," and it's, it could be sort of a complicated workflow or whatever. "And when I'm working on icons, maybe now I can just do it in the wizard," which, that's awesome.

Yeah. Love it. It was quick and easy. Quick and easy. And now he can do it himself. He doesn't even have to... I can just point him, give him a link to the, to the wizard itself instead of having to do it for them. So great.

So I'll ask Ed, 'cause I feel like there's this, a particular alchemy that happens when Ed and Mike are, are... If we if there's a seed of an idea that, that can excite both of [00:21:00] them, like, they're off to the races, especially during the snuggles. This was, uh, the new version of the Icon Wizard, I think, started just from the idea of, like, our current Icon Wizard's great, but there were all these times when, like, there would be a little artifact left over in a corner when something wasn't fully masked when you added a modifier.

And then the other one was, any time I had to add a new modifier to the wizard, I also had to go and create the cutout for that modifier so it worked in every single style. And I may have, I, I don't know if this is true, but I think I may have asked Mike, I was like, "Is there a way to do that programmatically so I don't have to do it every single time, and make that easier?"

With the idea of just upgrading the current wizard. And then you're like, "Well, if you can do th- uh, yeah, we could do that, but then we could also do X, Y, Z," and thus was born a new product. Thus was born. Yeah, so at the, at the most recent, uh, snuggle where we worked on this, which I guess was two snuggles ago, maybe?

I don't [00:22:00] remember. Um, yeah, it was the provocation of what if we could make it generate those cutouts automatically, auto-magically, as it were. And that was the task that I set out to do, and I had been wanting to do that for a while, was to get our SVG library, the thing that the Icon Wizard relies on under the hood is this SVG library that I work on.

So could we get that to generate those cutouts automatically? And, um, there's actually still a lot of challenging cases that remain to, to do that well. But that was the initial seed, that once we were able to, to do that, then it was like, oh, well, then we can use any icon as a modifier for any other icon, because we can just supply the cutout automatically.

And that was, that was the seed that was planted, and now we have the new Icon Wizard. Nice. And then, and then the seed was planted. It started to grow, and then Ed, Ed carefully watered it- ... and made sure it had enough sunshine, and coaxed it [00:23:00] along, and- Good job, Ed. Yes, I did all those things. Yeah. You got a r- you got a real green thumb, Ed.

I'm trying to make a little green thumb icon right now in the wizard for Ed. What, one thing we haven't done is, or we may be kind of assuming that, uh, everybody knows what it can do, but I'm just thinking there's at least three tabs to that thing, and each tab is kind of a different, you know. You've got the tab where you can select any base icon in any of the core styles, and then you've got the tab with the modifiers, the tab with the elements, which is another thing, and then you got the tab with the heads and bodies, and then you got the alphanumeric stuff.

So- I think you just described it perfectly. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of tools. That's a, that's a whole palette of- Yeah ... of brushes, paints, and other things that I don't know how to use. Yep. Sure. Yeah. And we're gonna, and we're gonna have more demo related stuff, um, related to the Icon Wizard. Um, [00:24:00] so we... Do we have a green thumb?

Like, in real time, I mean, come on. This is the Icon Wizard magic in action. Click the... I, I just shared a link. Oh, wow. That is, that is a green thumb. I- That's great, Jory. I was just imagining a, a thumb that you could make green, but this is so much better, see? So for those listening, not watching, uh- Yeah

here's what I did in the wizard. I, I opened it up. In the main icons tab, I searched for the thumbs up icon. I clicked the thumbs up icon, it landed on the canvas, and then I shifted it down to the very bottom of the canvas, and then I searched for our seedling icon, and I clicked it, and then I shrunk it down pretty small, and I shoved it up to the top of the canvas, and I stuck it right on top of the thumb.

So it looks like someone giving a thumbs up with a little seedling growing out of the top of the thumb. I mean, come on, man. Like, you did that in, like, probably 60 seconds. Ni- nicely done, Jory. Yeah. [00:25:00] It's, it's beautiful. Yeah. Utterly beautiful. Thank you.

Maybe what we should add to the contest is like a, a challenge of someone gives a prompt, and then who can build the fir- the icon, you know, based on the prompt the fastest. I don't... Man, maybe we could add... Yeah, speed rounds of icon creation. Yeah. Well, my hope is we're doing a live stream next week, which, I mean, I- that's probably after this podcast comes out.

Um, my hope is that, uh, for folks who join the live stream, that they can do that with Noah and, and, um, and me, where they can give us prompts for icons, and we'll try and create them- Yeah ... using, using the tools at our disposal. Yeah. Um- That'll be awesome. Nice ... so, so the wizard itself, so th- so, you know, just to go back to, circle back to what Mike said, is there are, uh...

There's a little, I don't know what we call it, a drawer on the left-hand side of this [00:26:00] tool that, uh, has four different tabs. One tab is just for icons, one tab is for modifiers, one tab is for what we're calling elements, and then one tab is for, um, user stuff. And the icons tab lets you search our entire icon library across our classic solid styles, so, um, our, our families and the, the, the different styles they're w- they're in.

Um, so, like, literally any of our icons. The truck icon, um, you know, person with mullet icon. Any of those you can add to the art board. Poo. The poo icon. You can add it to the art board, and, um, you can add n- you know, up to 20 of them if you want. And then once those things are on the art board, you have the ability to rotate them, to flip them, to shift them around the canvas, to, um, resize them if you need to.

And, uh, so that's with our core icons, and then the modifier tab is just like the existing icon wizard. It's all of, you know, a selection of [00:27:00] modifiers that are smaller to work, uh, that work well at smaller sizes. So they aren't our full kind of 16 pixel larger icons. They're closer to 9 or 10 pixels. Um, but they are purposely built to work well at smaller sizes.

We have a bunch of those that you can move and add, and then we have elements which are often even smaller than the, the modifiers, and those are meant to kind of be punched out or added on top of shapes. So, um, check marks, pluses, like Mike said, all of our, our letters. We have the alphabet. We have numbers in there that you can add things to.

And then the user... The final tab is the user blender, which is a bunch of different heads and a bunch of different bodies that you can kind of slap together. So you can, you know, combine Darth Vader with a, a doctor stethoscope body if you want. Um- Mm-hmm. I'm not sure that I'd want him to be my doctor, if I'm being honest And then Jory, what about the, um, the, the operation?

So when you [00:28:00] put it on the art board, you could, you could add it, but you could also subtract or, or use stroke. Could you describe when you would want to do one of those? Sure. So we have some defaults built in. When you add a, um, a modifier to the canvas, it's gonna have a stroked cutout around the outside of it so that, um, it's kind of punched out, out of the, the top shape while keeping the, the, the two, uh, initial layers, I don't know, f- solid, I guess.

Um, we have subtract and we have add. So subtract you would wanna use in the case of an element on a solid icon. So if you, if you threw a rectangle on there and then added one, two, three, you'd probably want the one, two, three to be subtracted, the Boolean action to kind of punch those out of the, the rectangle there.

Um, you'd wanna do the reverse, uh, and add them if it were a stroked, one of our stroke styles like, um, light, light or, um, thin, or even regular. [00:29:00] Uh, and then there is a, a fourth operator, which I don't know if we wanna talk about. That's currently not live in the wizard, but we are probably adding it in soon, which does the same operation with a stroked outline, but also punches out the center as well.

So it kind of does this contour cut around everything. Um, and then you also have, I think you also have the ability to adjust the size of that stroke too, for those cutouts if you want, to make it bigger or smaller, um, which can come in handy, uh, in certain cases. And I don't know, am I missing anything right now?

We have some new features in the works that are hopefully gonna be added before we go, uh, well, we take it out of beta, but, um, those are the main ones. You can, you can use your arrow keys to move the icons all around the art board. Um, yeah. You can add them. You can blend them. You can subtract them. You can flip [00:30:00] them And we have a bunch of, uh, features coming too, um- Yeah

allowing you to do more, uh, fine adjustment to rotation and scaling and all of those good things. Um, we're taking feedback from our users just to see, you know, what, what things are pain points there and, you know, just trying to make as many improvements as we can. Yeah. I tried to make the tool, you know, when I was working on the UI for it, make, make it work well for me, how I like to design icons.

But, you know, I'm an audience of one, and, um, was part of the reason we're launching it as a beta right now so that we can get as many hands on it as we can to kind of pressure test it and make sure the UI makes sense. And if it doesn't, we, we are, you know, willing and able and in the process of fixing those things.

Yeah. So folks, please, we'd love for you to, to play around with it and let us know if there's [00:31:00] anything that's a little weird or glitchy or if you had feedback. Uh, it's how, within the context of the community, it's how we make this stuff better. So let us know, um, where should folks reach out if they have feedback on anything related to the wizard?

Uh, well, the easiest thing is just feedback@fontawesome.com. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Feedback@fontawesome.com. Yeah.

One of the cool things about, um, the Wizard, and not necessarily w- like, we are running a contest right now, but outside of the contest, we allow folks to submit things to the gallery. And, and when you submit something to the gallery, it gets added. Uh, you know, we review them for kind of appropriateness.

But anybody can add something from the gallery to their own kit. So if there's an icon there, if that Starry Night icon that's in the gallery, if you wanna save it to your own kit, go for it. Like, it's, it's right, built into the UI there. Um, and you can also just share [00:32:00] your creations, there's a little share icon in the top corner there, out to any of your channels, to social media.

I ju- I just shared a creation in, in our chat thread here in this, in this call, and you can save that icon to a kit. So if you have, you know, if you have an icon that you don't wanna submit to the gallery but you wanna share with someone on your team or one of your friends, you c- you can do that, and then they can just, they can, um, download it and save it and do all that fun stuff with it too, so.

Okay, so now maybe a speed round. Uh, do you guys have favorite modify, a favorite modifier in the Wizard? The poop. Poop. I mean, I think he just stole Jory's thunder, man. Mm. I mean, what... We already knew you were gonna say poop, Jory. What, I mean, do you have a- It's really hard to pick between all my children.

I mean- Do you have a number two- ... I love them all equally. ... a number two modifier? Wow. [00:33:00] Um, I don't know. I like them all. I like them all. Yeah. I like the, um, I like the heart, the little heart modifier. Mm-hmm. That's a lovely one. Yeah. I mean- How about you, Mike? I have a hard time with favorites questions. It's a- Yeah

a different, difficult sorting algorithm, but, uh, let's go with the lightning bolt. Why not? That's a good one. It's in the set. No, I, I get that one. Yeah, I wa- yeah, whenever it's like, "What's your top 10 this?" or, "What's your favorite this?" I'm like, "Well, it kind of depends on the setting, man." You know? It's like, uh, if I'm gonna listen to music, like, uh, top 10s don't really work.

It's sort of like, it depends on where you are and what the, the purpose and mood is. So I mean, we have so many options. That's the beauty of it, right? Yeah. Listen, here's, here's the thing about, about poop.

Tell me, Jory. I actually think it's a [00:34:00] g- it's a, it's a great, uh, it's a great example of the different choices we make when we are dealing with regular icons versus modifiers. Because we have two versions of poop. We've got the poop icon, and we've got the poop modifier. And the poop icon, as I just shared a, I shared a creation with you guys in the channel there, but the poop icon has, uh, has three layers, and then the cow Three, three swirls.

Okay? And the poop modifier only has two layers, and then the swirl. So, you know, we choose to simplify things a little bit more when they're at smaller sizes. I never noticed that before. Yeah. It's just magical. So the other, uh, related to poop, um, the precursor to poop would be on the scale of one... Here, now we're doing scales, and, like, what's the top 10, all this stuff.

Uh, on, on a scale of one to 10, how disappointed are [00:35:00] you that this was not originally branded farts? One being not disappointed at all, and 10 being extremely disappointed. Two. Mike, really? I'm supposed to be more disappointed? Okay. I, I mean, I, I, uh, okay, I'll take the judgment away. Th- Mike's, Mike's ans- Mike's vote is two.

Yes. Neutrally stated at last. Uh, probably a six. Okay. Wow. Man, I just don't think it would've sold well. I think there's a novelty to it. I think it's fun to talk about in this context, but I think as an actual product, if I had to refer to it as farts, it would, um, get, uh, get old. Um- Sure. I- And old farts are the worst.

Yeah. [00:36:00] Nothing worse- Yeah ... than a stale fart. I mean- And listen, we got, we now have, we didn't have it with the version one wizard, but with the version two icon, we, uh, v- uh, tool, we now have a little mascot. We've got the little wizard, we've got a little wizard icon that, you know, you hover over it, the hat does a little wibbly-wobbly.

Um- But man, come on, like farts and poop and there, there's just like so many great opportunities there. It's probably a good thing that we work with the, the framework of, uh, Working Genius, because if it were up to me, it would 100% be farts. I'm like, I'm at a nine as far as like disappointment that it was not branded as farts, if I'm being honest.

Uh, but you know, it pro- you know, business-wise, it maybe w- wouldn't have been the best move, but I, I gotta- I, maybe it would've been ... I gotta admit- I don't know. Maybe the- Yeah ... novelty of it, maybe it would, you know- Yeah ... folks would be flocking to see our farts. Yeah. [00:37:00] That's a powerful fart, man. The ability to see it, that's amazing.

Yeah. I would love to see a flock of folks. That's children. Yeah. A, a flock of what? I'd love to see a flock of folks, actually. Mm. So- Mm-hmm ... they could've done that. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. A flock of folks with farts. Yep. That's right. Say that five times fast. Yeah. Flock of ... I, I might say bad words if I try to do that

Now we should say, I mean, I don't know we should, we could say that there was a long period of time where we were gonna, um, we were calling this the icon genie As opposed to the Icon Wizard 2.0. And, um, I remember we had a, this was the last snuggle. We had a, it wasn't a heated conversation, but it was a, it was a boisterous conversation trying to come up with, like, what is the n- you know, we have an Icon Wizard, what is the more powerful version of that?

Like, what is the next level of that? And we, [00:38:00] uh, I think finally enlisted Alex to kind of be like, "Well, it's an Icon Genie. Like, they can do anything." Like, you know. And we're like, "Oh, yeah, and then we could, you know, grant people wishes." And, and it was, um... I really liked it as a name, and we had some fun, fun stuff around that, and then we started to be like, "Well, it might get confused with the Icon Wizard that we already have."

And this, you know, this just became about trying to tell an, uh, a cleaner story that- That's right ... this does everything the Wizard does. It just, it's still the Wizard, it's just a better, the next version of it. So. Yeah. Um, yeah. And, and then what would we have called V3? Once you've, you, you've got, you've already burned the name Wizard and you've burned the name Genie, where do you go after that?

G- a god? A deity? The Icon Deity. The Icon Deity. Yeah. And then what do you go for V4? See where this goes? Uh... You're running out of- Mike. Hmm. Then we just give it a name. If you start at Wizard, you're, [00:39:00] you've already started at a very high level. Yep. True. True. I mean, if we didn't have, uh, you know, branding and licensing issues, we could call it Icon Gandalf or something like that.

But that, we, we wouldn't be able to do that. Nope. So it's- Yeah ... the Wizard. Um, and, uh, I like it. It's fun. Mm-hmm. It's fun to use, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I think we landed at a really good place. I think that we had a really good seed of an idea that we built originally, and, um, Ed just kept adding stuff to it.

Ed just kept adding the ability to share, the ability to download directly from it, the, the gallery, then the contest, and then there was like, oh, so many different... Like, it started to balloon in a way that I was like- ... "Wait. Oh, how do you, how do you do this from here? And what..." And like, uh, i- if, uh, for folks who know the original Wizard, the only way to launch it was from an icon.

Like, specifically you'd have to go to a search for an icon, you'd find an icon, you'd launch it, you [00:40:00] could add a modifier and save it, and then go, go on. You can still do that with the new Wizard, and it will pre-populate the, the canvas with the icon that you loaded it from. But, like, it was a big, it was a big deal.

This Wizard, we are confident enough in it and we like it enough that it lives in our main menu now. Like, right next to icons. It is top level, it is right there. So, um- I, I talked Jory into making the Icon Wizard a real boy and adding him to our top nav. Mm-hmm. Um, so That's great, man. And it all started a sn- at a snuggle.

Amazing. Started at a snuggle. Love it, man. Well done, Ed and Mike. Thank you for creating the Icon Wizard. It brings a lot of joy. And, uh, I love that we're really including the community in, in a, in a new way. And I, I'd love... It's g- it really has got [00:41:00] my imagination going, like, how can we do more stuff that, like, involves the community kind of in real time?

You know, we're having fun together. 'Cause I think we do try and get across, like, the, the sort of voice and tone of what we do. We're really, we're, we're having fun with the work that we're doing. Um, and we try to convey that, you know, as a company. But it's awesome when we get to include other people now that get it, you know?

So I think that's a awesome opportunity to do that with the Wizard. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fun. That's right. It's gonna get even better. Yeah. Better and better and better and better and better. Well, I appreciate you guys all coming on to talk about the Icon Wizard. Again, the, uh, the contest for the Icon Wizard is still going on till the 7th, and this podcast should release, uh, before the contest is over.

But you can go and, uh, submit your magical icon on the [00:42:00] Icon Wizard, and, uh, get it into the gallery. We'd love to see your creation. Um, so at this point, uh, in the conversation, in our Slack meetings, Mike has a special sign-off that he says, and we'll give him the opportunity to do so now. Mike, please. Go make something awesome.

Well, that's the new and improved Icon Wizard. Bad icons, good icons, everything in between. Go play with it, and if you're a paying customer, get a creation into the gallery before the contest wraps up on September 7th. And if anything feels a little bit glitchy or you've got feedback, send it to feedback@fontawesome.com.

That's genuinely how we make this stuff better when it's in beta. And thanks to Mike, Ed, and Jory for hanging out today. And in Mike's famous words, "Go make something [00:43:00] awesome."