About utf8icons.com

The reason for this web site: there is a trend these days to use "icon fonts" in web design, mostly because they reduce the required time to load a page and also the number of queries (eliminating all the icon images - presuming you're not using CSS sprites). These are great but they have a big drawback from my point of view: they require the developer to purchase one of these icon fonts and to @import it as a web font. In most cases this is a bit of overkill since most designs require just a few icons.

The initial purpose of this web site was to provide web developers with a simple way to find utf-8 symbols to use as icons in their applications. More specifically: to use unicode characters (from system fonts) instead of images in place of icons.

Even if that purpose remains unchanged, things have evolved somewhat during the early stages of implementations. The really early stages.

Now this web site is a place where you can find all the unicode symbols that are part of the utf-8 standard. The symbols are grouped by their subrange and are accompanied by a few options that show you how they can be used in different environments (HTML, CSS or even plain text).

Together with the standard utf-8 subranges you will find a collection of what I believe are the most useful symbols that can be used instead of icons. Some are the classic dingbats, some are arrows, while some are just beautiful (from my point of view at least).

Feel free to browse the web site and if you feel like it you can provide some feedback ucing the form on the contact page.

Cheers,
Stelian Andrei