We need to stop making "open source" icons which aren't actually open source. Illustrator files are not open enough so that many people can contribute or edit it to their liking. Look at the FontAwesome github issue page and see how many open issues there are vs how many pull requests have been sent. Not many, since few people have Illustrator.
What we need is a DSL (some already exist) and a framework which defines shapes and forms and which can easily plug things together. Ie. we have _only_ code for all the icons and with a simple "make" run we get our customized sizes, colors, formats etc..
I've actually worked with Asymptote [1] a lot and it would be very easy (and elegant) to define them in that framework. Another candidate would be Scala who can define DSL's elegantly and could use many existing libraries to put out th EPS. It's sad that people invest $50k on something that is again flawed: Not editable, not open (truly) sourced, not line-based versioned (git).
I've been wanting to start something along this way ever since I saw fontawesome but I don't think I have the time to invest. Maybe some day...
If you're worried that illustrator files are too proprietary, you should really consider working in postscript. illustrator will deal with properly handwritten postscript just fine and it's a mostly straightforward graphics dsl (especially if you're mostly doing icon design). plus, it's easy to convert to a pdf or rasterize it using any number of readily available tools.
if your concern is that the tools for creating OTFs and TTFs seem to be opaque, i would suggest you look at the UFO[1] specification which represents a font as a folder containing a series of glyphs which are, themselves, a highly domain-specific hybrid of svg and postscript. the AFDKO [2] added support for UFO last month(!), so there seems to be traction on that front. fontforge, natch, has supported ufo for quite a while.
the problem with picking on fontawesome is that for icon sets to work, they usually need to be consistent and it's hard enough to get people to agree to code style guidelines, much less visual ones which are wayyyy more philosophical.
in any case, if there's a takeaway it's to look at UFO, it will at least provide you with a free and transparent workflow, but how you manage that workflow will still be a challenge.
If you (or anyone else reading this) want to work on this problem, i'm happy to talk offline since i've been doing a ufo fork of fontawesome for work lately and have accumulated some domain knowledge on that front.
I meant a DSL (or at least a framework) to _create_ graphics. I don't propose a new file format. In my approach there is no such thing as a GUI tool since that usually means that you'll be editing a complex (non gittable) file format. I want to compile the source code to SVG/EPS, then use open source tools (such as fontforge) to create the font. But you don't have to, you can of course also create PNGs. I want a DSL that is optimized to describe graphics for humans (so no SVG).
And with a framwork you can easily adjust the fonts to your liking. Rounded edges in general? no problem. Rounded arrows? No problem. All icons with background of gray? No problem. Compile to 173x294 pixels? No problem...
It's much much more flexible than any Illustrator format will ever be and it'll allow real collaboration and source code versioning. I think asymptote would be great candidate and it's very close to the DSL I'd like. The good thing is that most of it is also written in asymptote itself so it's very extensible (unlike some other graphics languages)
Postscript is so unpopular to use as a programming language that github doesn't even have it in their languages. I'm not even sure if you're just trolling or serious?
I can second the use of postscript. A while back, I took it as a challenge to learn it, and ended up making some fairly extensive programs. I've actually found myself wishing there was a popular general-purpose scripting language that closely resembled postscript (stack-based, first class functions, first class environments).
You can download the books for it for free (the "blue book" is the tutorial). I highly recommend it, along with the "red book" which is also useful for adding to your general programming language theory.
I have a hard time seeing anyone actually use this for one reason: it's not Illustrator. Build something that allows them to completely use their existing, frankly much more user-friendly, workflow with no changes and it might at least get looked at. (Illustrator already supports EPS, but since everyone who matters already has Illustrator, not a lot of people bother, even when not running outside EPS's format restrictions.)
Nobody cares about your standards if meeting your standards doesn't benefit them. And the people actually creating stuff own Illustrator already.
>> We need to stop making "open source" icons which aren't actually open source
It took me a few rewrite of this to boil down to this question. Why do you say they "aren't actually open source". I'm curious to know what you're referring to. Is it that AI spec isn't open source, the files generated aren't open source because they require a paid application to edit, or the files themselves are binary formats and as such, aren't "source" in terms of how we think of XML or code.
If Illustrator was made free tomorrow, would that be satisfactory?
I can already edit EPS pretty well in inkscape and scribus but many developer still won't do it. To collaborate in graphics isn't easy.
No, even if Illustrator was open sources I would prefer to see real source code for icons. IMO Illustrator is over kill for something so (relatively) simple. Image a project on github that contains a very descriptive syntax, a hierarchy of re-usable shapes and which can be plugged together to generate custom icons. Then everybody can contribute to it with a pull request and we have true collaborative open sourced icon fonts.
I make resources like this regularly. You need illustrator, no half baked open source project even comes close to the features offered by Adobe's awful software. I don't use it because it's what everyone else uses, but because it's the best thing out there.If you forced me to use GIMP and an open source vector editor, I simply wouldn't have the tools.
Contributing non-code resources is hard enough without putting arbitrary limits like this in place.
Okay, it feels like you're not really referring to the premise of open source, but more that there isn't a suitable portable "source" format for simple graphics like icons.
What about SVG, is that a possible candidate? By proposing a new format, the real challenge is to have the graphical editors to use them. Expecting users to contribute graphics by markup isn't going to be much more productive in my opinion.
Yes that's exactly what I meant. Though, I think I wasn't clear and many people misunderstood me. SVG is to describe graphics and not to create graphics. We need a DSL that has loops, objects, methods, overlaoding etc so we can actually create a framework that allows creating EPS/PDF/SVG etc..
Some exist, there is very simple gnuplot. There is python matplotlib but it's a general purpose programming language and no DSL specific one. I think the closest is asymptote (which is very little known). Then is is processing but it's geared toward animations and also does mostly raster graphics. There is R which is mostly for statistics. Then there is TikZ which is awful since TeX was never meant to be a programming language so it'f far from a DSL.
I want to be able to describe shapes and extend them easily. I think Scala would be wonderful and somebody fluent in it could create a DSL and still allow extreme extensibility. We need a language which has multiple layers of API. One very low which can easily do lines, bezier curves and the usual. And then some higher APIs that allow _easy_ composition and intuitive transformations.
SVG is like PDF, a format to display but nobody wants to write PDF or SVG. It's no fun.
I beg to differ. Why should we describe a visual artifact using tools that are suited to describe logic and algorithms? Now, if you are wanting a DSL to describe HOW to make the visual artifact, that's one thing. However, the way art is created is not algorithmic, but rather a try something, visually inspect, and repeat process. Describing how the icon was created is not the main goal. Instead, the goal is simply a visual artifact.
Designers don't care if you think Asymptote is fun. They care that they can use Illustrator to get shit done. I do not understand why you are having trouble with this.
Would Inkscape[1] or some other open source vector graphic editor not fill the hole you describe ? SVG's have existing tooling and with later versions of Creative Suite should work with Illustrator without problems.
Infact - there are a number of browser based vector editors I believe. What would be very interesting is a github clone centered around providing preview, diff and edit functionality specifically for graphics. Another idea on the pile *sigh
While it looks like the source icons originate in Illustrator, what impresses me is the high level of support for other standards, making the icons useful and customizable outside of any graphics software:
"This includes support for emerging formats and technologies like Web Components, CFF, WebP, SVG 2.0, a top-notch, multiweight, unicode-mapped icon web font implementation, SVG animation and a powerful SVG DOM injection tool"
Now, that said, I've longed for an alternative to Illustrator. I like your thinking around the DSL, but because this is all inherently visual work, nothing will become widely adopted until the visual design tools supporting the standard are excellent.
You don't need a GUI or expensive programs to make very stunning and impressive graphics. I've coded SVG manually myself (using Jade templates) and I've written TikZ and asymptote and it works very very well. Remember, we are programmers and not graphic designers who need Illustrator since they often don't code.
Check out some stuff they do over at tex exchange:
You can also easily take existing SVG and extract the curve formats out, normalize them and integrate them in your project as a few arrays. You wouldn't start from scratch and have to redraw the github logo. You just put it into source code and things such as arrows you can draw with a few commands
They don't care. Designers don't care that you can code SVG manually yourself. They use Illustrator because it is the best software to do what they want. You need to respect that this is how designers work if you want to be taken seriously by designers--and that's step one of changing anything.
If it requires a text editor, you just lost 95% of designers (conservative guess) and you won't get them back because you've shown that you don't respect how they work.
Illustrator and related formats - EPS, AI - are considerably more featureful than SVG supports. They are able to mash their documents down to SVG, at the cost of losing data. Which nobody will do for raws.
And, as is so common with open-source attempts at graphics software, nobody takes Inkscape seriously. Sorry.
I don't say that designers should program instead of using their tools. What I say is: Stop the craziness of 50 different projects which give you some set of icons. Each a little different but each repeating things over and over again. Let's define one framework and go from their and satisfy 95% of all projects.
Let's stop the craziness of 50 different programming languages which all bundle slightly different sets of features. Can't we just put all the features in one language?
The reason to use one icon set on a web page is that the icons look good together. Putting a bunch of different icon styles in one set defeats this. A good designer has the skills to bust out Sketch and make another icon in the same style if they need it, and then contribute it back to the set for consideration.
If you're not able to do this, there's always http://icomoon.io/app/ which lets you bundle icons from different sets into one font.
And who, among the people who actually design and build icons, would care?
Hint: they use Illustrator. They're going to keep using Illustrator. They're not going to stop using Illustrator so you can have a marginally easier Github workflow.
Most pro artists/designers are going to have access to the Adobe suite.
That said...
The icon set at hand is based around SVG; while it claims to have a pile of 'open-source' scripts for improving the AI icon-generation workflow, I would imagine that you could load all the SVG files into Inkscape if that's your preferred vector editor, and build similar workflow scripts for it as well.
And if you want a DSL for graphics, check out Context Free[1]. It outputs SVG.
I didn't mean to say Illustrator is bad b/c of the not openness but more because of the file format. Icons ---compared to other projects done with Illustrator--- are extremely simple and we could use simpler tools instead which means we can use a programming language (an appropriate one, not python etc) to define the languages.
As long as we have the source and it is readable (hence my wish to use a DSL) people will contribute to it with pull request. The result of the kickstarter will not be contributable (except by a small fraction of people)
This can give you a slight taste of a well done DSL which can produce EPS:
Yeah but it's actually a lot of fun to design in Illustrator. I don't think the creators of this icon set would have wanted to do all of this stuff while not in Illustrator - or at least I can't imagine me wanting to do that.
Here's where we differ. Adobe Illustrator is like a canvas on an easel. Visual manipulations appear right in front of you, and then you can dive in and inspect. Change a color easily and know if it's right immediately. Not commit, then look at a rendered version, notice it's off. Try again, commit and then attempt until it's right. That's a huge waste of time as a designer. It feels magical to edit and create in Illustrator to me, and I'm sorry that someone offering free .ai files isn't pristine enough for you.
Your "editing" of a graphic file is still 4 steps, there's not much being cut out:
1. Click edit.
2. Propose changes.
3. Owner decides nothing is bad, or messes up other parts of the design.
4. Owner accepts pull request (still can't see the files in Github, because there is nothing for viewing graphical diffs anywhere yet)
The great thing about hosting on github is that people can send pull request and you have real collaboration. That's alsmost impossible with Illustrator files. In reality many OSS is abondoned and change leaders or simply die. If you have a source that is accessible by 100% of the programmers (and with icons there is a huge crows who's interested) then your project probably won't die.
Want will the kickstarter accomplish? Sure it'll give you great quality icons, but then what? What if the project is delivered and put open sourced? Is it going to be maintained indefinitely? For 2 years? 5 years? What about in 10 years? Can we still use it?
But now we're really off topic, I'm just re-elaboration why open source (and line based source code) is better. I could also argue why documentation in Markdown is better than word for highly collaborative projects....
Sure it can. If the source is "open", why should the platform for which that source is compiled have any bearing on it's description as such? Or am I missing something?
Your query was as to whether an application compiled for Windows or OSX could, in general, be open source. Whilst there may be a point to be made about the openness of Illustrator - I just thought that a tongue in cheek response would correct the more general assertion :) . Sorry for the confusion.
Well, by this logic, open software isn't open source unless you have access to a computer. It's only up to the author to grant permission, not to truly enable.
So, contrary to some of the discussion here, this icon set is _not_ going to be free or open source.
It's a bit vague about that, but if you go to the kickstarter page, note:
> [$35 pledge]: You'll get the entire icon set when it goes public in 2014. This is the least expensive Iconic will be—at least 50% off its price at launch. Well done, bargain shopper.
So they're planning on selling it for at least $70.
Or am _I_ confused about something? It is confusing; they need some straight up explanation of the licensing.
"Although this new version of Iconic will be commercial, it's important to state that the current open source version of Iconic will remain freely available."
so the version for which the kickstarter runs will be a new, commercial version:
- with a price >$70
- based/derived on the existing opensource iconic
- the icons in the opensource version will receive an update if they are also in the new commercial version
what i really miss tho is what kind of commercial license the backers/buyers receive for their backing.
But since a large number of people are still using old browsers (IE and Android[1] specifically spring to mind) excluding them still seems like a no-go and makes these icons much less desirable for commercial sites.
They are extremely cool though, I love the animation and styling especially. The grunt integration looks great too. These really look like icons to make developers / designers happy
Seems like the following are supported in Android 3.0 and above:
SVG (basic support)
SVG in HTML img element
SVG in CSS backgrounds
Inline SVG in HTML5
SVG SMIL animation
SVG fonts
If I was going to use it, my concern would be for IE 8 on XP because XP cannot upgrade after IE 8.
You can use modernizr.js to test whether it is supported and create a fallback I suppose.
At this point, you have to start questioning what market-share IE8 has and if putting in effort to support that fraction is worth the effort. At some point the web has to be allowed to move on. I say that point is now.
Yes, there is a considerable amount of people stuck on Windows XP for whatever valid or invalid reasons. No, I don't believe for a second that all of them runs IE.
That is basically my thinking. The link to a page where a designer opines about how the Radiation and biohazard are great symbols because they are no understandable on first glance, memorable and need to be taught.
Just like a floppy symbol. If you are young you wont understand it and need to be taught the meaning, the only possible part is the "memorable" test but...well, opinions and all.
That's like saying we shouldn't use the envelope to represent email, because no one sends snail mail any more.
The save icon concept makes no sense to me either, it really doesn't represent anything related to save, maybe download but without the word "save" next to it I would not have associated the two (and to me looks like a copy of the Burton Snowboard icon https://www.google.com/search?q=burton&tbm=isch)
I'm trying to load it in IE8 in my XP VM - as far as I can see the CSS doesn't even load (FF in the same VM worked however).
I was really stoked about this icon set, thinking 'finally someone has done it, now we have an icon set for true responsive web develop without the hassles' - bummer. It would be nice if OP included 'current limitations' and 'roadmap' somewhere.
I guess it's back to pngs and media properties and/or icon fonts, 12% of the user base is too large to miss. It's still great to see what awaits us around end of next year. XP is definitely EOL somewhere next year, which will trigger a good chunk of companies to upgrade. Old Androids will hopefully wash out of the market as well until then - also I'd say their web usage shouldn't be that relevant, except if you target emerging markets.
I'm super happy for Iconic but I kinda feel bad for its predecessors such as FontAwesome. FA did their work for free and produced a larger and equally high quality collection. I donated to FA and think they've raised $3,000 in 2 years. Iconic has raised $50,000+ in 2 weeks.
I love Entypo. I think their solid black shapes and subtle, stylish forms make their set of icons hard not to use.
I'm not sure how I feel about animated/interactive icons like Iconic is proposing. I feel that icons should be very simple and single-purposed: that is, labelling information, acting as a signpost. But I'm intrigued to see what happens.
How about no icons?
Could we kill the icon?
"Imagine letting go of the Xerox-inspired GUIs altogether. Imagine a native digital medium, instead of holding onto physical entities. It’s not going to be easy; but it will be the future of the UI. Contextually aware, transparent user interfaces is what we should strive for."
http://joecritchley.svbtle.com/kill-the-icon
"How would user interfaces look if we had no preconception of their analogies? No magnifying glasses for search; no cogs for settings. And then, with that tweet, I realised I had unintentionally focused on icons. It’s icons that are still the problem."
He seems to be making a leap I don't follow there. Why is the use of magnifying glasses/cogs a problem? Who are they a problem for? My 70 year old mother knows what they mean at a glance, as does my 7 year old daughter, and I doubt that many people in between struggle with their meaning.
Pictures often have more impact, and more visual appeal, than words. If I have to do a presentation and I create one that's nothing but words, my audience will typically be far less engaged than if I'd replaced most of the words with other visual clues.
And the same applies to icons. A big green tick is more immediate than a button with "OK" on it. I can spot a cog much more quickly in a screen than the word "settings" buried in a screen full of other words.
Does your 7 year old daughter know what a floppy disk icon does? I bet she does. Does she know what the floppy disk is though? Mine doesn't (12y/o). She just knows that she needs to click it if she wants to save a file in an editor. Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save".
You speak and read english because you're brought up with it around you. You don't need to know the latin roots for a word to understand it's meaning. The root meaning of an icon is not important, just the fact that it's a 'random squiggle' that is universally recognised regardless of context is it's strength.
You can remove all icons and just replace them with words such as 'save', but now you must translate them for all languages, and scanning for the word is slower.
However, interfaces packed with random icons which have no recognisable meaning - that is a terrible anti-pattern.
Yes, I agree, icons are much faster to recognise than words. But I think we're limited to only a handful of icons that are universally (??) recognisable. And now more often than not I find hovering mouse pointer over an icon just to find out what it does. How easy is to guess what these 3 icons do if you never used the tool before http://imgur.com/TclsCh2 ?
> But I think we're limited to only a handful of icons that are universally (??) recognisable.
Wouldn't you argue that the floppy disk is a universally recognizable icon for saving? It's hardly misconstrued for something else, and with the exception of youth, it does make sense (without using it before) to a majority of the population.
"Drawing a random squiggle" and assigning it a meaning is exactly how symbols work. Stopping your car at intersections has exactly nothing to do with red octagons inherently, its just a symbol that we've assigned a meaning to.
"Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save""
At this point there's really no reason to replace the floppy with a squiggle or anything else. It is a virtually universally understood defacto standard at this point, so unless there is a super compelling reason to stop (and I can't think of any) we should just keep using it regardless of whether anyone actually uses floppies anymore or not.
That aside, "random squiggles" make terrible icons. There has to be some notable structure to an image for it to have meaning when it is placed alongside other images.
Eg. if you had a "random squiggle" for save and a "random squiggle" for load, even if the squiggles were pretty different and were used consistently, most people would have a very difficult time remembering which is which if they were actually just random squiggles, and not something with a more clear & defined structure.
> Does your 7 year old daughter know what a floppy disk icon does?
Yes.
>Does she know what the floppy disk is though?
Possibly (she's into retro-gaming, and occasionally uses my Amiga). But it's not actually important because the icon means save. Anacronisms like that are a part of the way that language (both verbally and non-verbally) develop. I doubt that many people have ever written on a scroll. But using the word in the context of "scroll bar" isn't confusing as a result.
>Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save".
Except for the fact that we already have an image that means save that everyone understands. We could equally make up a brand new word for "scroll bar" to remove its anacronistic link, but what would be the point?
Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept. The metaphors of icons don't work.
A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other...
"Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs" - and we too use ideograms every day. %, &, +, $ etc. What else are they? "we've lost the link to the original concept" - which concept? And why (I mean, what indicates that this actually happened)? "The metaphors of icons don't work" - again, since when? Why? What substantiates this claim? "A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other..." - I agree and I'm sure there are countless examples of poorly designed icons, but it doesn't invalidate the very concept of ideograms. Just like the existence of milions of incomprehensible error messages doesn't really undermine the value of an error message in itself :) It's just poor execution of an otherwise valuable method of communication
Icons are not hieroglyphs, in fact the idea behind icons is the opposite. Icons trancend language and present a concept across language barriers. If you need to go to the bathroom in russia you will know which door to take thanks to an icon.
> Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept.
Hm? Egyptian hieroglyphs are not metaphorical ideograms but part of a "true" phonetic writing system. Nothing has been lost.
If I remember what I learned in Egyptology class, this is actually not entirely true. Although pure phonetic writing was possible, in actual practice hieroglyphs were a mixed system wherein individual hieroglyphs were sometimes treated as pictograms in order to give additional contextual meaning to a phonetically spelled word.
Thats a weak argument. The designers job is to choose sufficiently recognizable icons if they actually want them to be recognized. One magnifying glass looks like most others, and the same goes for most symbols in current widespread use.
Bad designers are the problem, icons are fine. Icons are more efficient. Reading the full word takes longer and recognizing an icon is something the primate brain has developed to excel at over millions of years, in the form of things like predators, prey and brightly colored, specifically patterned fruits shrouded in dense forests.
Pattern recognition runs deep. Icons aren't a problem any more than calling a search function "find" or "browse" or "look for".
>> DanBC: They're a problem for users who haven't used that interface before.
> babby: The designers job is to choose sufficiently recognizable icons if they actually want them to be recognized.
You're both right. It depends whether you're focusing on the people using computers today or the (larger, but more distant) people learning to use computers tomorrow.
Who doesn't associate glasses/binoculars with "find", "hunt", "look", "search". Even if I use a piece of software I've never seen before, I generally know what the icons mean, and usually buttons will have a title — or below the icon on OSX sometimes — on hover to give more information.
I don't need to imagine one. I have one. She's 7 now. She learned the meaning of those icons in the same way that she learned other words and symbols.
Knowing that you click on binoculars or a magnifying glass to look for things is absolutely no different to knowing to use the "search" or "find" option in a menu.
"I’ve read other people’s comments about how the floppy disk icon is a good thing. Seriously? Think about it. That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is" - so what? Noone really needs to ever have seen an actual floppy disk. That's the power of symbols, they become civilizational archetypes. Is that holding onto the past? Of course. That's the POINT. When was it that hourglasses still were in common use? Long before first computers emerged :) And yet all the "young people" (which is all modern people, if we follow the author's point and define "young" as "having no first-hand experience with the object depicted by the icon") had no problem understanding what hourglass represented. No doubt that over-reliance on icons leads to poor user experience - Gmail went in that hieroglyphic direction, they replaced a "spam" label with some mysterious octagon etc. - but too much of anything is bad.
Textbook example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The two things he cites to replace icons (gestures and text) in no way provide the same affordances and efficiency of icons. It seems like he's just trying to think big for the sake of thinking big, while ignoring the fact that conceptually an icon is at its essence the most distilled form of visual communication available. If you're going to say icons need to go away then you might as well say visual design needs to go away and we'll just use voice UI in the future.
This post is so hand-wavy and vague, it's hard to know what he's suggesting as an alternative. The last two paragraphs make no sense to me, can anyone translate?
I agree. They're open source at the moment, and they've been my icon set of choice for some time - I use them in my open source RSS reader, django-yarr, for example. In fact I came to the comments to complain about how there is already an icon set with that name, before I realised it's the same guy.
I understand why they're going for commercial licensing on top of the kickstarter, but it's a real shame if the new icons never make it into the open source project. I'm more than happy to pay for them if I'm using them commercially, but it would have been good if one of their stretch goals had been setting a chunk of money aside to feed the new icons back into the open source version for people to use in their projects.
It seems that middle click to open the button-links down the bottom of the page doesn't work (Chrome, Linux). Right-click open-in-new-tab works, though. Why do people break this?
Is it just me or is the clock not quite 100%? I see little grey lines/borders appearing around the individual blocks that are rotating. User agent, if it helps: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0
What we need is a DSL (some already exist) and a framework which defines shapes and forms and which can easily plug things together. Ie. we have _only_ code for all the icons and with a simple "make" run we get our customized sizes, colors, formats etc..
I've actually worked with Asymptote [1] a lot and it would be very easy (and elegant) to define them in that framework. Another candidate would be Scala who can define DSL's elegantly and could use many existing libraries to put out th EPS. It's sad that people invest $50k on something that is again flawed: Not editable, not open (truly) sourced, not line-based versioned (git).
I've been wanting to start something along this way ever since I saw fontawesome but I don't think I have the time to invest. Maybe some day...
[1] http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/