Just one year before the first web page went live in 1991, Microsoft began shipping perhaps the most well-known icon font, Wingdings. However, it would be nearly 22 years later before icon fonts would become a design trend on the internet.

The introduction of the @font-face CSS at-rule allowed web designers to specify custom fonts with which to display text. By 2011, all major browsers supported it. This gave birth to the idea that fonts composed of pictograms, like Wingdings, could be used in place of raster images on the web. Considering that real SVG support across all major browsers didn’t become stable until early 2020, icon fonts were the defacto way to add vector-based icons on your web site.

But icon fonts on the web were fundamentally flawed from the beginning. And now, with full SVG support at our disposal, it’s time to put a stop to their use, once and for all…

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