The Genericons Icon Font Story

Icon fonts are a truly great hack. They’re lightweight, scalable, and a clever way to use vector-based images on the web at a time when SVG just doesn’t have enough popular browser support to be practical. Despite starting out life as a hack, icon fonts are like the sprites of vector graphics, and I think they’re here to stay.

Enter Genericons, a new icon font made especially for blogs by Joen Asmussen with contributions from Sheri Bigelow and Takashi Irie. They were designed with simplicity in mind to keep a minimal, “generic” aesthetic so they can be used in a wide range of projects. They look sharp at small sizes because each icon has been aligned to on a 16×16 pixel grid.

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High Quality Icons for Themes

One of the barriers theme companies face in going full GPL with their themes—thus enabling their themes to be released on WordPress.org Extend—is a lack of great quality icons with open source licensing.

That’s one reason I’m super happy to see Post Format Icons released by StudioPress. Free, high-quality icons to use in your theme. Awesome.

Will this inspire other web designers and WordPress themers to open source their own graphics? I sure hope so.

What are your favorite open source icons?