Create Stunning Designs with the Font Awesome Icons in Thrive Architect

Author 
David Gavrilut   32

The Icon element in Thrive Architect features the Font Awesome Free icon package, a set of 1500+ icons that you can start using on your website right away! 

The Font Awesome set is a vast collection of vector icons, containing anything from  popular logo icons to more common ones.

With Thrive Architect, you get access to the free library of Font Awesome icons, which lets you take your page design to the next level.

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Icon Style Options to Match Your Design Choices

All icons in the package come in 3 styles: light, regular, and solid.

3 different types for any Font Awesome icon

This enables you to pick the style that matches the overall design of your website and give it a visual boost.

If you want to access over 8000 icons from the Font Awesome PRO library, you can purchase their PRO package from the Font Awesome website. Thrive Architect is fully compatible with the entire range of Font Awesome icons, including duotone icons.

We Didn't Stop Here...

In our latest update, we rebuilt our icon library, to load faster and manage icons more effectively. We also added the Material Design icons to our icon library, which is an open-source icon library created by Google. You can read more about this update in our July roundup post.

Why Pick Icons Instead of Images? 

Why should I choose an icon over an image file? - You might ask

First of all, we need to make an important distinction:

When we talk about an icon you can pick using the Icon element, we're referring to a specific file format, an SVG file. We're not talking about an image that acts as an icon but that's actually a PNG or JPEG format.

While both can look the same at first glance, you'll soon discover why we have to make this distinction.

An Icon is Much Easier to Find

Imagine this:

You need a couple of cute images to display on your website and you decide to go on Google Images and search for images with a transparent background.  

If you've ever done this, you know it's not easy at all finding the right images.

They either come without a transparent background, a size that is too small, or maybe you just have a hard time finding the right look & feel.

With Thrive Architect, adding a cute icon only requires you to open the "Icon" element, search for an icon and place it on your page:

Drag and drop the Icon element on your page and select the icon you like

Superior Quality

When scaled, a SVG icon has a far superior quality, compared to an image.

Here's an example: We have two similar files on a page, one of them is a SVG icon and the other one is an image:

When the two files have a small size, they don't look so bad

At this point, both of the files have a size of 150 pixels each.

However, here's what happens if we increase the size to 500 pixels: 

When the size increases, the image simply can't keep up with the quality of the icon

As you can see, the image's quality was severely diminished by this increase in size. 

However, the icon wasn't at all affected, and it looks just as good as it looked at 150 pixels.

Customization Options

And if all of the above hasn't convinced you already, icons have one more trick up their sleeve.

They are customizable!

This means you can change the icon color, background color and shape right within Thrive Architect.

You won't need any image editing tools like you would to change an image.

You will have no problem building layouts that look like this:

3 column layout built with a Content Box element and two icons

Or like this: 

 3 column layout built using the Content Box and an icon 

Use Them in Other Elements as Well

Up until now, we've seen how you can use an icon as a stand alone element, but it can also be used within other Thrive Architect elements.

For example, we can use it on the Button element:

Use the icon on the Button element

Or on the Styled List element

Icons can also be used on the Styled List element

Now's Your Turn!

Don't be afraid to try out new layouts and experiment how the new icons work in Thrive Architect.

Give it a try and let us know what you think, by leaving a comment below!

by David Gavrilut  August 7, 2018

32

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      • @Fabian and @Cedrick – So, with Font Awesome you can’t really upload your own icons.

        However, after looking a bit into this, I found that there is actually a pretty simple way to add your own icons, with IcoMoon.

        In your WordPress admin dashboard, access the Thrive Dashboard and look for the “Retina Icons” card. There you will find a blue hyperlink text that says “Click here”, it will send you to the IcoMoon App.

        On that platform, you will find the “Import Icons” option, which will allow you to search on your device for the icon you want to upload.

        Make sure the icon is in the right format and that it follows the IcoMoon Documentation procedures.

  • I noticed that these icons also don’t automatically load on all pages even if never used there.

    That’s great because i had a lot of icomoon icons and all my pages were abut 400kb more in size because of that.

    That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore so good job.

  • Great advice about icons and why/when they should be used. And super cool that 3600+ are now available for sleek designs and fast websites!

    • Hello, Karin 🙂

      Unfortunately, the icons cannot be downloaded because they have a certain format that can only be used on web pages.

  • Does anyone ever check their development skills at the door before they release an update or code?

    Seriously! The icons don’t work because your icon scroll window is bigger than its container ergo you can click the select button that it covers.

    I really can’t believe you people have not checked this over and over again because its been like this for months.

    • Hello Henry,

      Please create a support ticket with this issue. We can’t replicate what you describe in our test environments, so we’d have to see what causes this issue on your specific setup.

  • I’m really glad that as much of Font Awesome is so easily available. I think there are fonts from newer versions of Font Awesome 5.x that are not present. Are there plans to include all of the fonts in future Thrive Architect updates? For example, the symbol for “bacon” was added in Font Awesome 5.7 but is not available in Thrive. Doesn’t everyone need access to bacon? 🙂

    • First of all, I’m glad you asked that question because everyone needs to have access to bacon! Haha

      Jokes aside, we’re aware of that and we’re including the new Font Awesome icons in our next release. So, the bacon should be there soon too 🙂

      • Hi David, when will that be? Today is May 10, 2019 and I search this feature in vain. 🙁

  • Hello, this is a great idea, but unfortunately not possible with the current version of the TA, because I only get the IcoMoon offered. What do I have to do to use the icons of FontAwesome?

  • Hi David, I got this error message after clicking the add icon button:

    “Could not fetch FontAwesome icons: 500: The action could not be finished because of a fatal server error.”

    Whats wrong here?

    • Hi Sascha,

      Feels like a server issue which might be related to your hosting. Please open a support ticket and our team will help you out.

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