My old icon blog post lives again! noahjacob.us/words/fundamen…
Icon sommelier 🍷 Senior Icon Designer at Font Awesome. Before that, I made all manner of digital and physical things for MetaLab.
Work Experience
Making icons & illustrations — sometimes writing about them too
Pioneered the Specialist team, focusing primarily on iconography and illustration systems for digital products.
Designed digital app experiences for every kind of technological rectangle there is.
Projects
When you need subtle design touches for your project, the right icons can make a big difference. That’s why we’re so excited to announce Font Awesome Sharp!
Similar to the Thin style, we envisioned Font Awesome Sharp with a clean, modern look that pairs nicely alongside sharp typefaces like Helvetica, Roboto, Aperçu, and Franklin Gothic, among others.
I designed a full color, embossed tin to house 80 Elantris-themed bandaids for Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter rewards
In this podcast, we talk about icons, naturally. We talk about how we think building healthy and sustainable workplaces is possible. We also dive deep into the tech of how we build things. And, of course, we nerd out along the way.
Side Projects
600+ consistent & commonly-needed UI glyphs, all tailored to look nice and sharp at 16px
Broke the ol’ HTML and CSS out of retirement to build a new garden for myself. Always tinkering.
Made a fun icon pack ahead of the big announcement of FigJam 🤗 Try them out in your next brainstorming session!
Speaking
So you need an icon set for a project, only to find that all the stock sets don’t have quite what you need. You could try adding the missing icons or even (gasp) create your own set, but where would you start? Dive into the wonderful world of tiny pictures in this 3-hour workshop led by Noah Jacobus from Font Awesome, the internet’s favorite icon library andtoolkit. From rudimentary rules to cohesive collections, we’ll uncover, dissect, and build on the secrets of successful icon design.
Telling an effective story is the easiest way to communicate with your team and express your ideas. Come join Jory Raphael and Noah Jacobus from Font Awesome as they guide you through the crafting of their Config presentation, from initial napkin sketches to final polished slides. They’ll share valuable insights, best practices, and tips for compelling storytelling, while sharing how they made their presentation uniquely “Awesome”.
Come with us on a journey of Figma-specific tips, tricks, and insights we’ve gathered while using Figma as the "source of truth” for our library of over 30,000 icons used on over 200 million websites worldwide. We’ll focus specifically on how to leverage components (and their variants) while building an icon family, along with the benefits of live corners and boolean groups. And most importantly, we'll share how using Figma for our icon family has enabled deeper collaboration, teamwork, and systems thinking.
Are your icons a weird mish-mash of styles? Did a client give you a brand set you have to match for a mobile app? How even??? Wonder no more, as we go through some basics around UI icons, and how to make them consistent.
The very first event for the Friends of Figma: Iconography chapter, chatting through the similarities and differences for iconographers coming from the world of Adobe.
Writing
Rubber chickens and squirting flowers are great accessories for lots of occasions — just not a black tie event. And so it is with design. It’s true that Font Awesome is known for the whimsical and zany, but sometimes you need an icon family that captures a more formal tone. That’s why we built Font Awesome Sharp!
This is not a post about furniture
Features
“Dive into the minds of Font Awesome's Jory Raphael and Noah Jacobus as they discuss their unique approach to design process. Discover how they balance structure and creativity in the ever-evolving world of icon design.“
“Jory & Noah explore the history of Font Awesome and its development over the years. Jory shares how he came to hire Noah, someone he has admired and followed digitally for years (in the biz, it’s called a “designer crush.”) They also discuss their design process and talk a bit about the process of developing the Sharp family of styles.”
“In this inaugural episode of Nerd Show and Tell, host Matt Johnson interviews Font Awesome icon designer Noah Jacobus. They discuss Noah’s background in music education, how he became an icon design hobbyist, the monumental task of creating the Font Awesome Sharp family, and little bit about his love of handheld retro-styled games.”
Helena Zhang counts down her top 5 favorite new icon releases from 2022.
In this Nerd Show and Tell, Noah tells us about the monumental task of creating the upcoming Font Awesome Sharp icon family and shares his love of minimal, retro-styled games.