Some Random Dude

Programming, drawing, they're all just tools of the trade. It's like a hammer in the hand of a sculptor. Depending on talent and time (not either alone) you might get different results coming out.

People like to think in absolutes. You're either a designer, or you're engineer. You're either a scientist, or you're a philosopher. This attitude is not only wrong, but also completely contrary to what our "hero's" have taught us.

I myself went to art school when I was a kid, I didn't even realize until I thought about it a while back. Does that make me a designer? Not really. Could I pick it up if I put enough effort and time into it? Almost certainly, but will I?

The other thing is environment. The creativity part comes from the environment you're in. Good scientists have scientists around them that help them brainstorm even without brainstorming(not in the business sense of hey let's sit down and brainstorm, and more in the sense of discussing random thoughts at lunch or w/e). It's no different from Github, dribbble, conferences or a lot of other things that can be considered "environment". Part of why people want to work at google is because of the environment.

I attached a blog post of a pretty good designer that made the transition from being an engineer. [1]

[1] http://somerandomdude.com/2012/01/10/transition-from-development-to-design/

What sells me on Pictonic? I'm not getting anything from the homepage about why I should choose this over the growing amount of free resources. Constantly adding new ones without charge is great, but there have been rumblings about allowing people to submit their own to FontAwesome and letting the community determine if it sticks.

For those of you interested in making your own like I've been doing recently (ignoring the accessibility issues for now), download Inkscape (free, cross-platform), save your vectors out as SVGs either in Illustrator or Inkscape, import into Inkscape and use their glyph font tool to map to your characters. Take that SVG over to freefontconverter.com and grab the TTF, then bring the TTF over to Font Squirrel to convert for web.

And for those of you keeping score of the nice resources already out there (outside of FontAwesome) -

http://somerandomdude.com/work/iconic/

http://www.entypo.com/

http://thedesignoffice.org/project/modern-pictograms/

http://www.alessioatzeni.com/meteocons/ (weather-related)

http://typicons.com/

> I wonder if one could implement vector icons as fonts in order to properly hint them.

That's exactly what is happening these days with custom font embedding having become practical (in web pages): http://somerandomdude.com/2010/05/04/font-embedding-icons/ (that was in 2010, but this thing is really gaining traction these days following the release of "Font Awesome" for Twitter's Bootstrap[0])

In desktop OS, that is in fact a very old technique, that's why the Marlett font exists in Windows [1].

It does have a significant inconvenient though: the icon can only have one color for the glyph and one for the background. This provides a crisp look but lowers the expressivity of the icons. On the other hand, if the color scheme changes for some reason (or can vary from one page to an other), it is very easy to match the icons's color scheme to that of the application.

[0] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/16/10256947.aspx

Icon(ic) Fonts have come along way recently. These resources may be of use to some.

http://icomoon.io/app/

http://fontello.com/

http://symbolset.com/

http://somerandomdude.com/work/iconic/

Benefits include:

- Consistent Interface Fonts across all modern browsers

- Variety (not the same old bootstrapped site)

- Loading Time (sometimes faster than using images for headlines)

- SEO Friendly (it's just text)

- Better rendering for high resolution devices like retina displays

Disadvantages:

- Loading Time (additional download resource for clients)