Create icons by Typing with Symbolset Fonts

Mike Rankin

1

When you need to add some common icons to text, what do you do? Do you open a clip art library…and search for the right icon? Or maybe switch to a dingbat font…and search for the right icon? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could stop wasting time with all that searching and just type words like “check” and “twitter” and have the text magically transform into a checkmark and the twitter icon?

Well you can do exactly that and more with the Symbolset fonts by Oak Studios.

Symbolset fonts use the same on-the-fly character substitution technique as Travis Kochel’s Chartwell font. So as soon as you type the t in “alert” the letters are all replaced by an alert icon.

You can get a feel for the way it works, by typing some of the sample terms on the Symbolset.com home page.

Other benefits of the symbolset fonts include scalability and acessibility (screen readers and search engines see the actual words instead of the icons).