I personally hate using font awesome. I think it looks dated and already too generic. Every website that uses default unedited bootstrap and font awesome set looks so bland and indistinguishable to me.

OTH if you use their icons from e.g. Bootstrap as they are usually used then users actually recognize them without thinking and the icons actually help users interact with your website - which is the point of the icons anyway!

The same goes for classic simple buttons, nav bars color pallets etc - users know them already before they interact with your site. Most of that design work you did to make you site "different" or "beautiful" just made your site less intuitive for a user.

This opinion comes from experience building b2b webapps - users generally wish they didn't need to do the admin work the webapp is helping them do. So user stories are dominated by building the simplest quickest workflows to allow users to capture, fetch or manipulate the data they need and to then get back on with their lives - having standard controls that are familiar from other sites helps with this.

> Most of that design work you did to make you site "different" or "beautiful" just made your site less intuitive for a user

Don't you think it depends on a lot of factors, not just the use of a different icons?

Also I doubt users will have trouble understanding that a lock icon on feather and a lock icon on font awesome have the same meaning.

> Don't you think it depends on a lot of factors, not just the use of a different icons?

Of course - it all adds up. The trick is knowing where and when it is worth differentiating.

Vas majority of the websites that use font awesome icons are cheaply made projects that fail to get traction most of the time and have a relatively small user base. So using font awesome icons with an idea that it will help users recognize what they represent, is flawed. I doubt regular users who according to you "would have trouble figuring out what the icon means if they did not see it before" even visit the type of sites that use font awesome icons, they are primerely used by small startups or one men shops with users mostly coming from sites like HN or producthunt anyway.

Please do not misquote me like you do in this post.

> Most of that design work you did to make you site "different" or "beautiful" just made your site less intuitive for a user.

You can include the <svg> directly in HTML source code. No extra requests needed. In some circumstances it might be a better trade-off. Especially when you use a small amount of icons.

Also, you can style each path individually using CSS or SVG. That means you can easily have multi-color icons.

Are you asking generally the benefit of SVG over icon fonts? Github made a nice summary:

https://github.com/blog/2112-delivering-octicons-with-svg

Thanks for the link. I am looking for this.

I know I at least am getting skeptical and a bit unsure of the licensing guidelines of font awesome. A fully-MIT product might be a bit reassuring for some people. Font Awesome seems to be more transitioning to wanting everyone to pay for licenses (yes, there's a free model, but they're pushing pro pretty hard)