Podcast Awesome
On Podcast Awesome we talk to members of the Font Awesome team about icons, design, tech, business, and of course, nerdery.
🎙️ Podcast Awesome is your all-access pass into the creative engine behind Font Awesome — the web’s favorite icon toolkit. Join host Matt Johnson and the Font Awesome crew (and friends) for deep dives into icon design, front-end engineering, software development, healthy business culture, and a whole lot of lovingly-rendered nerdery.
From technical explorations of our open-source tooling, chats with web builders, icon designers, and content creators, with the occasional gleeful rants about early internet meme culture, we bring you stories and strategies from the trenches of building modern web software — with a healthy dose of 80s references and tech dad jokes.
🎧 Perfect for:
- Icon design and content-first thinking
- Creative process and collaborative design
- Work-life balance in tech
- Remote team culture and async collaboration
- Internet history, meme archaeology, and other nerd ephemera
🧠 Come for the design wisdom, stay for the deep meme cuts and beautifully crafted icons.
Podcast Awesome
Notdog: The Icon Pack That Is Not a Hot Dog
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What do a scene from Silicon Valley, a typeface shaped like sausages, and a bottle of mustard have in common? They're all part of the origin story of Notdog, one of Font Awesome's small-batch Pro+ icon packs. It's glossy, it's gooey, and it is very much not a hot dog.
On this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Font Awesome designers Noah Jacobus and Jory Raphael to talk about how a challenge from Dave Gandy ("can we make an icon pack that looks like this?") turned into one of the first proofs that Pro+ packs could work at all. Noah explains why one simple rule about shine shaped every icon in the set, why his early emoji faces looked like dino nuggets, and how a pack inspired by tubes ended up looking like condiments. Plus: the actor who plays Milton in the Font Awesome marketing videos eats a lot of hot dogs on set, and we settle nothing about which regional hot dog is best.
What We Cover
- How a Silicon Valley gag and the Frankfurter typeface combined into Notdog
- Why every icon needed room for a highlight, and how that set the smallest possible shape
- The shift from tube-shaped strokes to blobby, condiment-style forms
- How Noah builds a test set of about 10 icons before committing to all 200
- Why Pro+ packs trade some legibility for personality, like a headline typeface
- The faces that fought back, and why the Duotone style is the one to use
- Notdog's starring role in the Font Awesome 7 video
- Chicago dogs, Seattle dogs, and the legendary $1.50 Costco hot dog
Timestamps
00:00 Not a hot dog
00:45 Welcome to Podcast Awesome
01:00 Jory lists his favorite hot dogs
02:00 Why is it called Notdog?
03:45 The Glyph book and the "could we even do this?" challenge
05:15 Mood boards and sausage balloon animals
06:45 From tubes to condiments
08:15 The shine rule
09:00 Building a brief: from 200 icons down to 10
11:15 Core Font Awesome vs. Pro+ personality
13:45 Where you'd actually use Notdog
16:15 The easy icons and the dino nugget faces
19:00 Why Duo is the Notdog to use
20:15 Diner art, Milton, and hot dog consumption on set
24:15 Notdog, Jelly, and Slab: the first Pro+ packs
27:15 The best regional hot dog?
29:30 The $1.50 Costco hot dog legend
32:00 Wrap-up and credits
Links
- Explore the Notdog icon pack: https://fontawesome.com/icons/packs/notdog
- More episodes of Podcast Awesome: https://www.podcastawesome.com/
Credits
Hosted produced and edited by Matt Johnson
Guests: Noah Jacobus and Jory Raphael
Theme song by Ronnie Martin
Music interstitials by Zach Malm
Video editing by Isaac Chase
#FontAwesome #PodcastAwesome #IconDesign #GraphicDesign #DesignProcess #Typography
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