Shoelace Joins Font Awesome

Shoelace Joins Font Awesome

No, it’s because I’m so in love with you!

We’ve got some super-big, super-awesome news today. Shoelace and its creator, Cory LaViska, are joining Font Awesome!

Open Source

At Font Awesome, we love open source. It’s why we made our icons open-source in the first place. And it’s why we never have and never will remove an icon from the free version. (We’ve actually grown the free set 300% since we found a sustainable business model.)

Web Components

More recently, at Font Awesome, we’ve also fallen in love with web components. Seriously, they’re awesome. We pride ourselves on being maniacally reasonable about technology (hence FA lets you use either SVG or webfont). We don’t get into religious battles about what is “right” in tech. We care about what helps us work better together. And wow, do web components fit the bill. Here’s the short version:

  • Separates how your components look (UI) from how they work (UX), allowing easy theming now and (more importantly) fast retheming later.
  • Sandboxed styling means you can drop any web component into an existing site, and it won’t break your site.
  • Highly readable markup. You can immediately understand what you’re looking at.
  • Easily create a translation layer to any JS framework we want (Vue, React, Angular, etc.). Write once, and use it everywhere.
  • They’re web standards. Unlike the latest fad, web components will be around for a long time.

Web components have a TON of promise. Cory has written a great web components primer and a web component story that are a great read.

Shoelace

And most recently, at Font Awesome, we’ve been falling in love with Shoelace, Cory LaViska’s open source-web component library. It’s a huge collection of components with great UX, easily themeable UI, awesome performance, and vetted accessibility. Seriously, the amount of time saved is mind-blowing. And all of these things mean teams can work better together. Shoelace might just be the biggest, best web component library out there (open source or not). That’s why they recently passed 100 million monthly CDN hits on jsDelivr.

Stay Tuned

This is all why we’re so completely bonkers excited to have Cory and Shoelace joining us at Font Awesome. And make sure to read Cory’s announcement. We’ll be working together on what’s next for Shoelace. Stay tuned.