Frances BotsfordThe question isn’t “What are we going to do,” the question is “What aren’t we going to do?”
Awesome Alpha Alert!
We’ve been cranking hard on Version 6 and have a lot in store for you. For this alpha, we focused on stocking the shelves with icons – so you can dash through them like an infinite-time Super Toy Run. If you count them all up, we’ve now got over 11,110 icons!
Introducing the Thin style
Light as a feather, these new thin icons won’t weigh your designs down. We’ve created a Thin version of every one of our icons from scratch. They’re perfect for more modern and minimal visual themes. Version 6 gives you 5 different styles to choose from – Solid, Regular, Light, Thin, and Duotone (plus Brands!). On the web, you can use Thin just like any other style via a specific prefix. It’s true, fat is the new thin!
Less is more (fun) with our new thin style.
Icons Incoming!
In this first alpha of v6, we also added over 350 brand new, fresh from the lab, icons. These are available in all of our five styles too. Team favorites include X, Y, and Z, literally. But you should go find yours!
All Icons – Revisited, Revamped, and Ready for Action
In our endless pursuit of perfection and to raise our icon echelon, we’ve touched every single Font Awesome icon. Each curve, corner, vector, and line has been inspected and fine-tuned so they look better than ever – in any of our styles. We think you’ll be surprised at that old fa-car when you open the fa-garage.
Everything old is new again.
Under the Hood
Shiny icons aren’t the only thing we worked on. We got our hands dirty to revisit gritty details like icon naming conventions and how styles are referenced on the web. We tried to make each easier to use and remember. Our goal – helping you spend less time picking apart bugs and more time picking icons.
Straight-Forward Style Prefixes
When using Font Awesome icons on the web, you need to add a style prefix to choose which style of icon you want to show up. In version 5, we used an abbreviation – like fas for “Font Awesome Solid” or fad for “Font Awesome Duotone”. For Version 6, we’ve added a longer name that’s easier to remember. In Version 6, use fa-solid or fa-duotone to get the same. As we add more styles (<cough> Sharp styles <cough>), we hope this leads to less mysteries in your markup and that you know more easily what icons and styles are in your project. (The old way still works, too!)
Speedier Style Switching!
For lvl 20+ icon mages and O.G. Font Awesomers, we also brought some new magic to the general fa style prefix. You can now assign a specific style in your CSS (thanks to Custom Properties) and leave setting class-based style prefixes on every icon in a galaxy far far fa-away.
Better Icon Names (and Icon Aliases)
While adding thousands of icons in Font Awesome 5, we learned a few things (some the hard way) about naming icons. So, we took a long look at our icon names with Version 6 and made them more descriptive, memorable, and manageable. So now you’ll find fa-gauge instead of fa-tachometer-alt-fast, fa-truck-clock instead of fa- shipping-timed and circle-plus instead of plus-circle.
But don’t worry – while there are some big changes, they aren’t breaking ones. We’ve kept the old names around in the form of Icon Aliases. So all your icons will work no matter what!
Heads up! In this first alpha release, the old icon names will only work with our Web Fonts+CSS method. Old icon name support via Icon Aliases will be coming to your SVG+JS waters soon!
And There’s More!
There you have it – this first alpha brings you fa-trucks worth more icons and some pretty large fine tuning.
In future alphas and betas, we’ll be focusing on other aspects of Version 6. And of course, we’ll be making things better with your feedback (thanks in advance) along the way.
Oh, and remember to check out the other v6 alpha and beta releases we’ve got out there too.
All these goodies are included with your Font Awesome Pro Plan. Don’t have a plan? Subscribe today and try out the Version 6 Alpha and all the other great stuff Font Awesome offers.
You’re still here? It’s over. Go try out the Version 6 Alpha!
