Both from a design point of view and from a web development point of view, icons are seriously an invaluable resource and a powerful tool. They work on everything from navigation to section headers, and can take your content scan-ability to a whole new level for your users.

However, their inherent simplicity deceptively masks the amount of time and love required to create quickly recognizable icons that really work for your users. It takes time, iterations, discussions, and even a healthy discourse or two to ensure that a set of icons compliments the brand and the experience you provide to your site's visitors.

Once you elect to embrace the power of icons, you'll quickly find that the typical options are very cool and accessible. However, do keep in mind that they are generic... which is good from the recognizability POV, but bad if they don't have what your business needs. Nevertheless, here's some great resources of the amazing open source font projects that your designer or developer can start using today:

• Font Awesome
• Google Material Icons
• Zurb Foundation Icon Fonts 3
• Fontello
• Fontastic
• Typicons
• IcoMoon
• Elusive Icons
• Modern Pictograms

Both from a design point of view and from a web development point of view, icons are becoming an invaluable resource. Their inherent simplicity deceptively masks the amount of time and love required to make universally recognized imagery really work for your users.

Creating your own icon font is an absolute advantage for your business if the open source options aren't working for you. There are paid options and icon font services that have very large amounts of icons, but trust me, as a designer and from experience, you always end up trying to make an icon mean what you want it to mean, because there's not a perfect icon in your chosen library.

The advantages of developing your own icons (and huge bonus points for turning these icons into a web-usable icon font for your website apps and digital projects) are lengthy, just keep in mind that the process of developing the imagery itself takes skill, care, and even a bit of clever talent. Here's some of the best advantages:

Attention Span

Realistically, the biggest advantage of using icons is that they have a way of helping the mind of a user to focus somewhere that interest them. That keeps their attention engaged. Nothing makes a user leave a page like lines and lines of text with nothing visual around them.

Websites & Web Apps

Using icons across all your digital products and sites (both public facing and internal business operations sites) brings an instant advantage for your business. Quite simply, well chosen fonts makes finding parts of a page easier to do... on all devices. Add some color or some visual way of making the icons stand out, and you've just given your users and employees an easier time to get things accomplished.

Print Materials

Icons used across both print and digital mediums are even more powerful. The icons really become an extension of the brand when used in print, so be sure to test and iterate before millions see it. It's hard to unlearn a decent icon image!

Marketing

After they've been implemented and your users are accustomed to your icons, you'll often find them very useful to target your marketing campaigns in both visual ways, and in contextual ways. The icons themself will suggest ideas just like the logo does.

Branding

Here's the catch, bad icons are bad for your brand. They confuse and frustrate users. So when adding icons to your products or brand, it always pays off in the long run to really be sure the icons are capturing what they represent. With hard work, and a good critical approach, any business can develop icons that

In my personal and profession projects, I've found icons and icon web fonts to be absolutely invaluable to get both a 'wow' response as well as a functionality and usability boost for users. I encourage you to use them, and help to create a better, more consumable web.