If you’re building an icon system for a site, you have some options. If you know the icons need to be raster images, then you’ll likely be using CSS sprites. If the icons will be vector images (much more common these days), you have some options. Two of those options are using inline SVG and using icon fonts.

In this article, I’m going to examine the science behind making successful UI icons before teaching you how to make your own embeddable icon font.