There are many excellent icon sets available. Each icon set has its own custom syntax, some are available only as fonts. Unfortunately, almost all of them load an entire set, even if you are displaying just a few icons. This makes it hard to use different icon sets.
Iconify tries to unify all icon sets. You can use the same code no matter what icon set you choose. You can mix icons from multiple icon sets on the same page.
or, if you are building a project with something like WebPack or Rollup, you can include the script by installing `iconify-icon` as a dependency and importing it in your project:
That is it. Change `icon` attribute to the name of the icon you want to use. There are over 100,000 premade icons to choose from, including Material Symbols, Photphor, Remix Icons, Carbon, Unicons, Bootstrap Icons and even several emoji sets.
Do you want to make your own icon sets? Everything you need is [available on GitHub](https://github.com/iconify): tools for creating custom icon sets, Iconify API application and documentation to help you.
What are advantages of using IconifyIcon web component?
Advantages of using Iconify components:
- No need to pre-bundle icons. Pass icon name as parameter, component will load data for icon from public API and render it.
- Huge choice of icons, no icon fonts!
- Easy to style. All monotone icons use font color for color (`currentColor`) and font size for size (height is set to `1em`), making it easy to change color and size.
Main advantage of web component over other implementations is shadow DOM. Using shadow DOM instead of inlining SVG has the following advantages:
- Document's styles do not affect content of shadow DOM, so there are no conflicting styles.
- HTML served from server does not contain long code for icons. It only contains `<iconify-icon />` tags, which reduces document size. Frameworks that use SSR and hydration, using web component for icons means same HTML code generated on server and rendered in client, preventing potential hydration errors. Actual icon code is hidden in shadow DOM.
Web component has several render modes, which can be changed by passing `mode` property:
-`svg`: renders icon as `<svg>`.
-`bg`: renders icon as `<span>` with background set to SVG.
-`mask`: same as `bg`, but uses masks instead, combined with `background-color: currentColor`, which results in icon rendered as background that uses text color.
-`style`: `bg` or `mask`, depending on icon content.
Why are these modes needed?
It solves issues with SVG 2 animations. Usually, when SVG contains animations, animations do not start until DOM is ready. This can be affected by small things like ad code failing to load, preventing animations from working and causing frustration to developers. However, this is not an issue if SVG is rendered as background - animations are ran instantly. Also performance of SVG 2 animations is much better when used as background or mask. Background is used when icon does not contain `currentColor`, so all colors are displayed properly. Mask is used when icon contains `currentColor`, so icon is used as mask for background that uses `currentColor`, so icon correctly follows `currentColor`.
If background and masks are so good, why SVG mode is available? First issue is color: if icon has mix of `currentColor` and palette (please do not design icons like that, it is bad practice!), icon colors will be incorrect, so such icons should be rendered as `<svg>`. Second issue is performance of icons without animations. Animated icons do perform much better as background or mask, but icons without animation usually perform better as `<svg>`.
What is default rendering mode? That depends on icon. If icon contains SVG 2 animation tags, icon is rendered as `<span>` with background or mask (mask for icons that contain `currentColor`, background for other icons), otherwise icon is rendered as `<svg>`.
When you use an icon font, each visitor loads an entire font, even if your page only uses a few icons. This is a major downside of using icon fonts. That limits developers to one or two fonts or icon sets.
Unlike icon fonts, Iconify Icon web component does not load the entire icon set. Unlike fonts and SVG frameworks, Iconify only loads icons that are used on the current page instead of loading entire icon sets. How is it done? By serving icons dynamically from publicly available JSON API.
Relying on a third party service is often not an option. Many companies and developers prefer to keep everything on their own servers to have full control.
Iconify API and icon sets are all [available on GitHub](https://github.com/iconify), making it easy to host API on your own server.
You can also create custom Iconify API to serve your own icons. For more details see [hosting custom icons in Iconify documentation](https://docs.iconify.design/api/hosting.html).
While the default method of retrieving icons is to retrieve them from API, there are other options. Iconify Icon web component is designed to be as flexible as possible.
There are 2 types of icons: monotone and coloured.
- Monotone icons are icons that use only 1 colour and you can change that colour. Most icon sets fall into this category: FontAwesome, Unicons, Material Design Icons, etc.
- Coloured icons are icons that use the preset palette. Most emoji icons fall into this category: Noto Emoji, Emoji One, etc. You cannot change the palette for those icons.
Monotone icons use font colour, just like glyph fonts. To change colour, you can do this:
