As we’ve been building out our site, we’ve wanted to showcase the icons of various projects and protocols. However, there’s been a real lack of any kind of icon font for that purpose…Mastodon is pretty much the only Fediverse project to be featured in FontAwesome, and the ForkAwesome project has been dormant for a long time.
So, we’ve been building our own.
Thanks for the response! It makes sense that you’d have to build stuff from scratch if you could not reasonably find something somewhere else that “fits”. A good work on hosting that extra tidbit yourself, too.
As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn’t a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.
Has this impacted your decision process on how to iterate this over time? I assume at some point there will be more or different projects going around, some projects may die but their archives might still be around, who (if anyone) counts as the authoritative voice on how a given project’s icon should look, etc.
Good question. For now, we have a basic process for submitting icons, which requires adding details about the project repo, information on the icon, and Copyright attribution for whoever created / owns the brand.
We recently incorporated a JS library that allows us to generate the font from the SVG files themselves, which also builds the preview pages that can be viewed at icons.wedistribute.org. With a bit of extra automation on Codeberg, we could basically update the preview page and generated set every time a new icon gets merged in to the main branch.
Our goal is to get to a point where new releases automatically get created, and an archive of the assets gets attached as well. That way, once a milestone gets completed, a new release will get put out with minimal amounts of work.
