If you’ve ever developed a website, you’re probably familiar with Font Awesome. The free service lets developers adorn their site with over 500 icons using only a line of CSS, and is used on about 40 million websites including the official website of the White House.
Now, Dave Gandy, the creator of Font Awesome, is launching Fonticons, a subscription service that will take Font Awesome’s original idea to the next level.
The company was founded by Gandy and Travis Chase, who grew up a block away from each other and after working together off and on for 18 years are now collaborating to start Fonticons.
The service will offer the same features as Font Awesome, along with some added benefits for its paid subscribers. These exclusive features will be in the form of three subscription tiers ranging from free to $99 per year.
One of these new features is the ability to create icon kits, which is a way to tell Fonticons exactly which icons your site needs, so it doesn’t use extra bandwidth loading unused icons. The service’s CDN will even store your kits on servers around the world, then serve them from whatever machine is closest to the end user.
A second feature for paid accounts is the ability to import your own vector icon (say of your company logo), which will be imported into a kit so you can use it like any other icon.
Additionally, Fonticons also has a marketplace where you can buy exclusive icon sets from popular designers in the community. The service currently has about 10,000 icons available, but the company says that will soon skyrocket as more designers are added to the marketplace.
Interestingly, the marketplace will also help users commission custom icons from a designer, which the company says will help the common problem of an icon set missing just one or two key designs.
Gandy and Chase say that the added features should be enticing enough for users to make the jump to Fonticons. That being said, Font Awesome will always remain a free service, and the team is sill planning to offer incremental updates.