Articles Tagged icons

A pleasant little romp through iconography and culture from Sophia Lucero. The “hamburger” menu icon we’re familiar with now is really a sign from Taoist cosmology.

Besides ☰, which represents heaven 天, we have ☱ for lake/marsh 澤, ☲ for fire 火, ☳ for thunder 雷, ☴ for wind 風, ☵ for water 水, ☶ for mountain 山, and ☷ for ground 地.

We shouldn’t be using it for a menu icon, but it makes me wonder if we ought to … Read article “Hamburger ☰ Heaven”

I’m not sure what to call these icons from Astrit Malsija. The title is “500+ CSS Icons, Customizable, Retina Ready & API” and the URL is “css.gg” but they aren’t really named anything.

Anyway, their shtick is:

The 🌎’s first icon library designed by code.

The idea is that they don’t use clip-path, they aren’t icon fonts, they aren’t even SVG. They are just <i> tags essentially using the shapes of CSS and pseudo elements as necessary to draw … Read article “css.gg”

Here’s a nifty trick from Andy Bell that now seems a little obvious in hindsight: if you set an SVG to have a width and height of 1em then you can change the size of it with the font-size property.

Try and change the font-size on the body element below to see the icon scale with the text:

See the Pen
Font size controlled icon by Andy Bell (@andybelldesign)
on CodePen.

You pretty much always want your … Read article “Control Icons with Font Size”

This is a great look at accessible SVG markup patterns by Marco Hengstenberg. Here’s the ideal example:

<button type="button">
  Menu
  <svg class="svg-icon"
     role="img"
     height="10"
     width="10"
     viewBox="0 0 10 10"
     aria-hidden="true"
     focusable="false">
     <path d="m1 7h8v2h-8zm0-3h8v2h-8zm0-3h8v2h-8z"></path>
    </svg>
</button>

There are lots of unicode symbols that make pretty good icons already, like arrows (←), marks (✘), and objects (✂︎).You can already colorize these like a normal font glyph. Then, there are emojis, those full-color suckers we all know about. What if you could take just the shape of an emoji and use it like a normal glyph? You can!

Preethi Sam shows how:

.icon {
  color: transparent;
  text-shadow: 0 0 #ec2930;
}

Plus, an alternate technique using background-clip. … Read article “Emojis as Icons”

I’ve been watching a lot of nature documentaries lately. I like how you can either pay super close attention to them, or use them as background TV. I was a massive fan of the original Blue Planet, so it’s been cool watching the Blue Planet II episodes drop recently, as one example. A typical nature documentary will always have a little look how bad we’re screwing up the environment twist, which is the perfect time and place for such … Read article “Extinct & Endangered”