Bentonville Tech Company Font Awesome Rolls Out Major Updates to Platform

(Font Awesome)

Font Awesome, a Bentonville-based technology company, is coding new ways to make icons on websites, well, awesome.

Already used on more than 200 million sites, the company is launching the newest version of its product this month, Font Awesome 7.

Simply put, Font Awesome is a collection of icons — symbols like hearts, stars and shopping carts — that designers and developers can add to websites, apps and other projects.

After Google’s font tech, Font Awesome is the most used font script technology at 30.4% of the market share, according to Wappalyzer, a tech profiler that analyzes what websites are built with. The company was founded in 2014.

Unlike static icons, Font Awesome provides vector icons, or images that can be scaled, styled, animated and sharpened no matter what size they are. The icons are compatible with traditional coding platforms like HTML and CSS, as well as more modern frameworks.

“The goal is to bring powerful visual tools into the development workflow without adding unnecessary complexity,” Jory Raphael, director of product at Font Awesome, said. “And for folks who don’t need the techy side, we also make it easy to just download icons one at a time — for things like PowerPoint presentations, posters and other noncode uses.”

Font Awesome does have a free “Kit,” which is the company’s name for a personalized bundle of icons with its own specific embed code. With the free kit, users can start adding icons to sites “right away,” Raphael said.

After the free version, the company offers subscription tiers: Pro Lite, Pro and Pro Max, each with a “plus” version.

The new Font Awesome 7 features big improvements on how the icons work, Raphael said. “At its core, it’s about making things faster, more flexible and easier for everyone to use,” he said. The update helps icons load faster, modernizes the company’s code and works better with accessibility technology like screen readers and right-to-left languages.

Visually, Raphael said, the company cleaned up and refined existing icons and added more than 300 new ones. The company also added an “Icon Wizard” tool, so users can now mix and match colors and other customizations to create more than a million icon variations.

Among the updates the company is most excited about is the introduction of icon packs. “Each one has a unique visual style and includes a curated set of 200 commonly used icons, designed with help from some amazing designers,” Raphael said. “They make it easier to match icons to the overall look of your project.”

Major websites use Font Awesome, including Dungeons & Dragons, Amazon Web Services, Fitbit and the United Nations.

And though Font Awesome 7 is a huge addition and overhaul of the company’s offerings, the company is working on expanding into new markets. The company launched Web Awesome, an open source library of website components in April, an endeavor that raised $764,809 on Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding platform.

The “Awesome-verse,” as Raphael called it, also features Eleventy, a software system for creating websites, specifically, static websites, or sites where each webpage is a fixed HTML file.

The company, though based in Bentonville, is fully remote, with employees across the United States. Raphael called it a “calm, interesting and meaningful” place to work. It even has a podcast, Podcast Awesome.

“What started as a small tool for developers has become something much bigger,” Raphael said. “We’re pretty excited about where it’s headed.”