So once we have filled up our new document with icons, artboards will allow us to have a perfect overview and organization for the complete set. The script also creates a new artboard named according to the file name (minus the file extension), places the file contents, centers the object, and aligns to the nearest pixel. If you want to skip to manually copy/paste hundreds of SVG’s to artboards, you can use this handy Illustrator script “ Ai Merge” by Iconfinder, which will import your folder with SVG, AI, EPS, and PDF files and place one icon per artboard. With the release of Illustrator CC 2018, you can now, instead of 100, create up to 1,000 artboards in a single document. So let’s start with a new Illustrator document with 200 artboards, each sized 24×24 pixels, that will be used as the base document for our icon set/font. Each Illustrator document has at least one artboard (the main canvas), but you can add more and have them in a single document. To manage and keep track of a large amount of icons and exporting them to various sizes and formats can be a Sisyphean task.Īdobe Illustrator has a pretty perfect solution, called ‘Artboards’, to keep up with large amount of icons in one place and being able to export all of them to SVG, with just one click.Īrtboards are canvases included in a single document. Imagine you have a bunch of vector icons, in different dimensions and styles, each one in its own document and you want to create a consistent and unified icon font. Easily export multiple icons to SVGs using Illustrator’s artboards Let me walk you through the steps of creating an icon font. You can also download my free icon set from Iconfinder. The icons have to be consistent and in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. Nonetheless, icon fonts are, in most cases, a great solution for adding resolution-independent graphic assets to your website. Icons from an icon font can only be a single color and, due to differences across browsers, rendering and font smoothing can be unreliable. Icon fonts load faster than background or inline SVG’s ( see this experiment).īut to be clear, there are some disadvantages too.You can use the same icon in different sizes and colors to save time and space.It’s easy to apply CSS properties without editing the icon itself (color, gradient, shadows, etc.).Implementing icons as a web font has many advantages compared to SVGs: Since using non-standard fonts has become commonplace in web development in recent years, this has also lead to the rise of icon fonts, that are simply fonts containing symbols instead of typical characters from the alphabet. That was for many reasons: scalability, performance and ability to recolor them without maintaining a large amount of image files. In the history of the web, designers have tried a variety of methods to use icons on websites.
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