Font Awesome Black Tie | Hacker News Reader

Font Awesome Black Tie

kickstarter.com

60 pointsfortawesome30 comments

I love Font Awesome and use it all the time....but this campaign is to help fund development of a "somewhat faster" commercial licensable version of existing icons?

I would be a lot more apt to donate if this was just to help fund Dave to make more icons freely available.

Black Tie is a completely new icon set designed from scratch. Different look and feel than the original Font Awesome.

Supporting this will also give me more time to work on the original Font Awesome, too!

Appreciate all your've done with Font Awesome...just not sure about black tie (while I get that it loads fast cutting points such as the star example IMHO makes the icons look odd like an images missing anti-aliasing).

> a completely new icon set designed from scratch

FWIW this was not what I got from a quick glance through the KS page. I left with an impression that you are just adding extra weights to the FA.

Also, making a completely new icon font ... damn, that's going to be a tough thing to market. Every second person on Dribbble considers it their blood debt to release at least one icon font, usually a freebie. There's ton of established icon fonts too, some of which are extremely well marketed and are essentially the go-to standards in the designer (paid) circles. Granted, you've got a great name at your disposal and an attention of a large user base, but given that FA is free, I just can't help but wonder what your conversion rate is going to be like.

[1] http://hlvticons.ch/

[2] http://pictos.cc/font/

[3] http://www.entypo.com/

[4] http://icomoon.io/app/#/select/library

Looks fantastic, and I love FA so thank you for that.

Probably too late for this feedback, but the pricing differentials between being a backer and just licensing it when it becomes available were too narrow to entice me to back it. I.e. The $30 savings by backing it now instead of (potentially) buying it outright later this year just wasn't enough savings to convince me to back it. You could read this two ways - lower the backer goal amounts, or increase the licensing costs. I think you could safely do the latter :)

Don't know how I feel about this to be honest.

On one hand, FontAwesome has been a champion worldwide for free, easily usable fonts, shouldn't the creator get some sort of compensation?

On the other hand, will FontAwesome be put away in the shed? Sort of like the Nginx free/elite-turbo-premium offerings.

Font Awesome will see just as much love, if not more than before. The last release, less than a month ago, had 71 new icons. The original Font Awesome isn't going anywhere.

Backed, if for no other reason than to support something I've used on countless projects for years.

It will be interesting to see the new weights/styles, and better scaling of BlackTie.

Good luck Dave!

Me too. Even if I never use this font, I've gotten enough benefit from Font Awesome over the past year that I feel like I should support this guy in continuing to do awesome things.

I like this idea (and backed it!) but I'd have liked if the fact it was going to be a commercial font was more apparent on the KickStarter page, as it feels a bit buried at the moment. I doubt this was deliberate, but I can say personally having the 'Font Awesome' brand being used so prominently made me think it was going to be open source.

I'll see what I can do to make that clearer!

And thanks for the support. I made it clearer in the tagline.

Font Awesome is great, but am wondering if at this point Dave has already given away too much free milk to now try and sell the cow.

I think he is just trying to support his family. ;)

Backed to help support Dave continue his work on Font Awesome since it is the most popular library on BootstrapCDN. Good luck!

In my opinion the old icons look much better. The examples given of the new icons look unfinished and choppy.

I don't think they are unfinished, just a new art direction. But it seems to have less neutral style that before and that will reduce adaptability to its surroundings.

The thing is font awesome scaled up well, but not down near as nicely. Black Tie seems to scales down nicely, but looks a bit too minimalist (or maybe just chunky) at larger sizes for my taste.

@fortawesome: Could we get some views that show true to size comparisons of the new font at a few different scales. Some overly large images of 4 of the icons just doesn't cut it near as well as seeing things how we would use them!

@fortawesome: See how you have the super large versions of your font's on the font awesome homepage? Make sure the new icons still look good that big!

Kickstarter makes this a bit tough. I'll see what I can do to add some varying sizes.

Just supported at $25, a drop in the bucket for the value I've gained from FA.

Love love love these backer options:

Pledge $299 or more: Choose an icon to be added to Black Tie OR the original Font Awesome - you decide one icon to be added, I do the design.

Pledge $999 or more: Choose 4 icons to be added to Black Tie OR the original Font Awesome - you decide four icons to be added, I do the design.

Pledge $1,999 or more: Your logo in Black Tie & the original Font Awesome. Must be square-ish, single color, & you must have the rights.

The corporate-logo option might be underpriced: 4/10 already sold.

If I was starting a new project, I'd use Ionicons instead of Font Awesome.

http://ionicons.com/

Hmm, that font seems to be copying Android and iOS icons nearly 1:1. How does that hold up from a copyright perspective?

> Your support will allow hiring another developer to build new features and give me the time to focus on making every single icon sub-pixel perfect.

How do you make something sub-pixel perfect? Is there some tool you can use or do you need to test on many different monitors/computers?

It's about the difference between designing just for 14px as well as a variety of larger sizes.

A bit surprised that the backer awards do not include a tie.

People pay for fonts? That's crazy talk. Especially if it's a symbol font.

Actually yes they do! I have a few symbol fonts in my library that cost way more than he's asking for the 4 weights.

My personal hesitation isn't due to paying for a symbol font...I'm waiting to see a bit more of the font so I can decide if the style is neutral enough that I'll be able to use it in enough places to make the cost worthwhile.

Why don't you just google the symbol you are looking for and pilfer something from image search, like a normal person?

I don't think it's really paying for 'font' symbols but paying for something that's easily droppable in your HTML using <i> tags. At least that's why I use FontAwesome.

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