Probably unsurprisingly, at one point on our website journey our Website Committee wanted icons. Icons are useful, right? They provide a somewhat standardized way of communicating the complex metaphors that are the currency of web design.

But icons are not surprisingly not an easy problem to solve. Sure, you can find any number of icons with a Google images search, but besides varying licenses, these will come in many different sizes and file formats. Which is fine, I suppose, until you want them to all behave the same way on your website.

Enter FontAwesome. I was initially very suspicious of FontAwesome. They want to make money off of icons!? What hubris. But it turns out that using standardized icons makes a big difference in reducing the amount of (CSS) labor that goes into putting icons on a page. For example, you might want all of your icons to be a fixed width; FontAwesome has a CSS class that does exactly that. And other such niceties.

So we pay for FontAwesome. It is possible that we might have squeaked by on FontAwesome’s free tier, but we would have been uncomfortably close to the cap. I am aware of alternatives like ForkAwesome, but since FontAwesome is doing what we want, we don’t have much incentive to switch.

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