Your Social Icons?

[lurkalot]

Am I allowed to borrow your social icons, (top left of screen), for use on my own site(s)?

[d3vcho]

I guess you are, because I found the same icons on flaticon.com

[Antes]

http://www.dreamstale.com/free-download-72-vector-social-media-icons/

[Biology Forums]

I'd suggest converting to font-awesome. Best decision I ever made

[Arantor]

I'd suggest converting to font-awesome.

Only if you're already using FA - otherwise these icons on their own will actually be a bigger download than FA.

[Biology Forums]

Absolutely. It's better only if you use it exclusively for all icons in terms of loading times

[Arantor]

Depends on how many icons you have, actually. If you have a lot of icons throughout your app, sure, the overhead is worth it. But if you don't have many icons to begin with, you really have to start weighing up the cost.

It's possible to make an image sprite + CSS that's smaller than FA for certain sets of use. Plus FA has a sense of 'everywhere uses it' which while adding familiarity, also adds a sense of 'nothing distinctive'.

[Biology Forums]

Thing is, image icons are not scaled nicely with varying resolutions. They need to be extremely large to scale them to fit most resolutions, and that increases loading times. Most websites have jumped to image fonts for their icon needs, including Xenforo.

[Arantor]

Because there is no such thing as SVG images?

I'm not disputing FA as a solution overall, I'm disputing general "always use it" type advice because generic advice however well meant has a habit of not applying to people when they don't realise it.

It will work well for a lot of people but that is by no means deserving of "always" grade advice.

[Biology Forums]

True to that, my advice is general and doesn't exactly pertain to what this member needs. I guess if the member is asking permission about using generic icons, they're probably not ready for a major overhaul anyway

[Bloc]

If you use a tool like Icomoon ( https://icomoon.io/app/#/select/font ) you can tailor-make a font with just the glyphs you need, even across different fonts. No need to download the rather big (pre-built) font-awesome font/kit. Its a bit more work and some learning to do, but well worth the result IMHO.

SVG images I have mixed feelings about, but that too is a better alternative than a full font-awesome - or graphic images(for icons).

[Biology Forums]

↑ Excellent suggestion

Didn't know this...

[Arantor]

Browser support for SVG images is now pretty standard...

[Biology Forums]

I meant I didn't know you could customize it, that saves a lot of space

[Arantor]

I was addressing Bloc, the only real concern with SVG images is browser support, which is pretty much across the board now.

[Bloc]

Yes, I am aware. I do see the advantages of SVG images, nicely summed up on this page:
https://css-tricks.com/icon-fonts-vs-svg/

Have to look more into them, but my tip still stands: making small icon-font files is possible with for example something like Icomoon.

EDIT: in fact, Icomoon can work with SVG images too.

[Arantor]

That debate is for icon fonts vs SVG fonts - but you can also use SVGs generally too; last website I built for my company had the company logo as a crisp SVG image, the comment from the Mac designer guy in the office was that the logo was so sharp you could cut diamonds with it...

The web is rich with different techniques these days

[Biology Forums]

@Arantor, what were the dimensions of the logo?

[Arantor]

It's an SVG, dimensions are kind of arbitrary...

[Biology Forums]

Mind sharing company details? Curious what you run

[Arantor]

I do web development for big corporations for an agency, we have a platform about 10x the size of SMF in terms of code. This also leads to... interesting technical decisions getting made sometimes.

As it's my day job, and we don't consult outside of (large) business to business, I don't exactly want to share details.

[Biology Forums]

From what I understood, I thought it was you who ran the company.

[Arantor]

From what I understood, I thought it was you who ran the company.

Nope, last two years I've been working as a senior PHP developer for a digital agency.