There are various free icon fonts out there and, with the increasing use, new ones are being created each day.
MFG Labs Icons is one of them, it is a slick, free and pretty complete icon font.
It is a web app-themed set considering most of them are actions (and there are social items as well).
The download package includes all the popular web-font formats and the styles for them.
IcoMoon is a free service that enables us to create custom icon sets and icon fonts using different sets.
The application includes most of the popular and free icon sets (that can be selected from its library), we can choose which ones to use and select any number of items from them.
Once the selection is over, it offers 2 types of downloads: image and font.
The image version comes as PNG with optional sprite image + the CSS rules and the font version in multiple formats (EOT, SVG, WOFF, TTF).
Also, besides the icons of other designers, IcoMoon has its own and free icon set which is pretty huge and slick.
There are very nice icon fonts out there, both free or paid, and they provide flexibility in several ways compared to using standard icons.
However, a major drawback is that icon fonts usually come as a single font file where we need to load the whole file to use few items.
You’ll remember Fontello that allows us to create custom icon fonts via a web interface. Font Custom, an open source tool, is a command line alternative for it.
Simply target the folder that has your SVG or EPS icons and it’ll generate the fonts.
Also, it’ll keep watching the folder in case you make any changes to the icons and will always keep the fonts up-to-date.
P.S. The rules in the CSS generated are named similar to Twitter Bootstrap which is nice for the fans of the framework.
Here is a fresh and very useful icon font which can easily fit to any websites and apps: Ligature Symbols.
This free icon font consists of 200+ letters with items like actions, smileys and more. Also, a huge number of social icons are included.
The download pack has all the versions (SVG, EOT, TTF, WOFF) needed for cross-browser support and the styles needed to use it.
Just like "there is never too much icons", there is also never too much icon fonts and here is a new one.
Sosa is a free icon font with 120+ items under categories like web, social, e-commerce, forms, weather and more.
It comes in multiple formats: .ttf .eot .svg + .woff and can be consumed with @font-face CSS property.
Icon Fonts (or pictograms) are available for a very long time but the ones that are specifically designed for web apps are appearing lately.
They are so flexible and fun to use considering each icon can be resized, colored, rotated and styled very easily. No need to hack them in our image editing apps but just CSS is enough.
And, making buttons, menus, lists, etc. with icons becomes painless as we deal with a single element: "the text" rather than "the text and the images/icons".
Previously, pictograms for common-use were shared (Designing With Fonts: 30 Useful & Free Dingbats). But, this time, we come up with the ones that are perfect for websites and web apps, the ones that may replace your icon sets. And, they are free.
Entypo is a high-quality icon font with 100+ items and available in OpenType font, vector EPS and web font.
Font Awesome is designed to be used with Twitter Bootstrap but also can fit into any other web project.
There are 150+ items, comes with various font formats and includes CSS + LESS styles.
A set of 90+ slick pictograms which can be used in any size (but work much better in >24px).
Sometimes, like switching between OSs, we require a font being in a different format for a better compatibility
FreeFontConverter is a web application that enables us to convert from -almost- any font format to another.
Besides the common font formats like TrueType (.ttf), OpenType (.oft) and PostScript (.ps), it supports .svg, .bin, .dfont and many others.
FontPark is a fresh and huge repository of free fonts with over 70,000 items in their database.
All the fonts are categorized very well within titles like 3D, Sans Serif, curly, etc. and they can be browsed by "last added", alphabetically or "top fonts".
You can define a custom text where all the fonts will display that to help you better decide which font to get.
What Font Is is a free web-based service that helps identifying and/or finding alternatives of a font.
It works by simply uploading (or mentioning the URL of) an image including the text.
The service offers the option to include only free and/or commercial fonts in the results.
And, you can browse a gallery of 70,000+ fonts inside the "All Fonts" menu.
FontCapture is a simple & free web application with an impressive function: it turns any handwriting into a font.
It does not require any software and works in few steps:
The service automatically creates your font & presents you the download file.
Also, just before downloading the generated fonts, you can see a full-preview & decide to re-create a new one or not.
P.S. The service is currently in beta status.
