The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The Road to Font Awesome 5 (Interview)

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Dave Gandy joined the show to talk about the history of Font Awesome, what's to come in Font Awesome 5 and their Kickstarter to fund Font Awesome 5 Pro, and how everything they're doing is funneling back into the forever free and open source — Font Awesome Free.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. I'm Dave Gandy and you're listening to The Changelog. Welcome back everyone. This is The Changelog and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 226 and today I went solo talking to Dave Gandy, the creator of Fawn Awesome. You've seen it. You know it. You love it.

It's awesome. But Fawn Awesome 5 is here, kind of. It's on Kickstarter right now, just over $500,000 in backing. But I talked to Dave about his beginnings, where Fawn Awesome started, where it's gone, where it's been. We have three sponsors today, CodeSchool, Linode, and Rollbar. Our first sponsor of the show is our friends at CodeSchool. And if you want to learn something new, a proven method is to learn by doing. And that's exactly the way CodeSchool

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Again, use our special URL, codeschool.com slash changelog. Don't Google it. That's the only way to get our special deal. Once again, codeschool.com slash changelog. And now, on to the show. All right, we're here with Dave Gandy. Dave is the creator of Font Awesome. and I'm riding solo on this show, so Jared is not here today.

But Dave, what's up, man? How are you? Hey, how's it going? So Font Awesome, I mean, you got awesome in the name. How awesome is that? Yeah, that was a very fun part of the naming process is how the name turned out, that's for sure. So, I mean, this is not a new project this is and I have to apologize

too because the change law has been around for a while we've wanted to cover Font Awesome at least a couple times and it's just never made it past the us getting in contact with you mile marker but you're now getting ready to version from I think 4.6 to 5. You got a

Kickstarter out there. You got a lot of fun stuff happening, but this isn't a new project. So how far back does this go? Yeah, this trace is back about four and a half years now to a startup I was working at ages ago, still with my co-founder, Travis Chase, and I was working on our company's website and I was griping and complaining about how bad icons were and how hard they were to use. You'd have to bring them into Photoshop. You'd have to individually color them. Then maybe you got to deal with some PNG sprite maps, right?

It was just kind of a mess. Oh, yes. And there were some other folks that were doing some really interesting things, I thought, with icons as fonts. But they had some problems around accessibility. So started digging around it, continued to gripe and complain. And Travis, in his usual fashion, told me to shut up and solve the problem myself. And so that's where Font Awesome came out of. Wow.

I mean, nothing better than a project like this with the years. I mean, I know so many people and so many websites that use Font Awesome. So, I mean, that's in and of itself, you know, a tribute back to what you've done here. But the best thing is, is when you scratch your own itch, you scratch this problem that's like, this is really bugging me. How do I solve this problem? So your co-founder slash buddy, Travis is, is who kind of pushed you to do. Is that right? Yeah. So Travis and I, it's kind of funny how the world works out. Sometimes, um, Travis and I actually are childhood best friends of 25 plus years. Wow. Um, so we go way, way, way back. We both are from a little tiny town called Carl Junction, Missouri.

Big shout out to everybody there who's probably listening to this. Like a thousand people, maybe two thousand people in town. Four thousand one hundred and twenty three or so the sign said outside of outside of my house where I grew up. Gotcha. OK, cool. But we grew up together. I went off to school up in Boston at MIT and spent a lot of time around the startup community there. Travis stuck around Carl Junction, married his high school sweetheart.

And about, goodness, it's probably six or seven years ago now, I figured out that Travis had quietly become the best software developer I knew on earth. What? Yeah, it's really, really funny how that works out. How did he do that on you? He didn't tell you? He didn't say like, hey, I'm trying this or I'm doing this? No, I mean, I knew that he was a developer.

I just didn't know he was that good. And so once I figured that out, we've basically been working together professionally ever since. Wow. And so take us back to, I mean, one thing we like to do on this show is kind of get a history. I mean, one thing, the history with this show might be the fun, awesome history, but the other history might be to some degree, which you just shared there is your history. So you mentioned that you and Travis were childhood best friends. He secretly became this awesome software developer.

But what's your history? What goes back? You said in the pre-show that, I don't know if I should say this for you, but you can say it for yourself, but you're more designer than developer. Yeah, that's definitely true. I think in general, well, you know what? I'm not really either one, truthfully. I kind of sit in this weird half world. I think most real designers think I'm a developer and most real developers tend to think I'm a developer and most real developers tend to think I'm a designer. So see, we always are so self-deprecating as people, you know, I mean, right. I mean, it's my wife calls it negative self-talk and I do it to myself all the time. And, you know, we haven't done it yet, but we have this, um, this set of sub taglines that

kind of define who we are here at changelogging and uh one of them is not an imposter and i think you're not an imposter i think you're exactly who you are i think you're both designer and developer and you can claim both roles well you know i think i think the truth is for me where it really goes back to um is sort of a is a general outlook on life. Icon fonts, the natural restrictions inherent in that medium. I'm not an illustrator by any means, but the natural restrictions of designing at a very small size and trying to make it readable was playing to my strengths. You know, not like I said, not an illustrator, but I can handle that particular set of constraints really well. And the truth is, Fawn Awesome actually came out of a personal

journey of mine in trying to figure out after college, this sort of whole, this whole world of who I actually was. And I think a big part of that is that we in the world spend a lot of time worrying about our weaknesses, things that we're bad at. That's true. And the truth is, I think we get a lot more attraction in general in life and a lot more satisfaction out of worrying about our strengths instead playing to our strengths and so there was a point in which i realized that the worlds i really love to live and i really love to live in these intersections of art and technology the left brain right brain where both are required and so fun, just sort of naturally came out of that particular, um, I guess really adjustment in my own personal philosophy on life. I think that everyone is a unique and diverse set of strengths. And if we will play to those strengths of ours,

um, that I think there's so much that gets unlocked by us when that happens. So take us back. You said you were in college. What's your story there? When did you become or not become a designer or become or not become a developer? What was the thing that sort of pulled you into it, into this intersection, as you mentioned? Yeah. So for undergrad at MIT, I studied mechanical engineering and I really always gravitated towards product design specifically. I found out the place where I really excelled there was in sort of the common sense, robust approach to engineering. And design is really a lot of that. medium and the people that you're designing for the situation and trying to really think on behalf of those individuals how to best tackle the problem in the simplest, most robust way possible.

And really at the time, all of my jobs happened to be in software, but I've always had a passion for arts and design. And it really came in a move out to Los Angeles. I spent a couple years in Los Angeles and being around the arts and such creative people really brought that side of things back to life. And so always very passionate about, you know, technology and art, but it was really that we were that reawakening that sort of is where real emphasis on product design specifically came from. So all of my jobs were in computers at the time, and it just sort of gravitated that direction. Instead of physical product design, I started focusing on digital product design. And there were so many parallels. And at the time, the industry was well far behind physical product design.

Physical products, there was a very good process established for user-centric design. And it wasn't really until Apple came out with the iPhone that that became really an industry-wide sort of a thing where people really saw in software how much design and the interface really mattered. It seemed like the iPhone really did wake up a lot of people that user experience matters. And I know it seems so simple to say it's just a phone or whatever, but they really, that kind of company really helped shape and change people's minds towards what a good product actually is. Yeah, it really did.

And for me personally, my sort of career trajectory shifted from feeling like I was talking to a brick wall at software companies when I was talking about design. Because they're like, what is that? Exactly. Exactly. What's the priority there? Look, we've got this machine that prints cash. I don't know why we need to worry about that. Okay. So let's get closer to the beginnings of Fonautism. You mentioned that it was scratching your own itch. You've spent some years. I mean, I'm actually surprised. I don't know your history, so that's why I'm surprised. Not so much that you're

not worthy of this, but that you have a background, uh, at MIT studying in mechanical engineering. I, what, what brought you into that field? Like what made you think that, uh, that that's where, I guess what got you to MIT? You must be pretty, pretty smart. Uh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think people tend to think that until they get to mit and then everybody thinks they're below average once they get there right they're like uh i'm actually not that smart i'm trying to be really smart and this is a place where you get smart yeah and the one thing that's really true is that mit is good for nothing if being good for your ego um that is a really really good place to figure figure out and figure out a little bit

of who you personally are in your own identity. And so, yeah, there's a big path actually even taken through my time at MIT. But I think originally for me, I mean, gosh, I grew up playing with Legos when I was five years old. My parents got me the original Lego castle. I just always liked making things, always liked building things. And so when it came time to, um, to go to college, uh, it was really just about, you know, where can I, where can I keep doing that? Where can I learn from people that know how to do this? Where can I build? And I'm the kind of guy that's always been, I've never really enjoyed learning for its own sake. I've always really enjoyed learning for doing sake.

Um, and truth is when I was in fifth grade, uh, I saw a PBS special about these kids at MIT building these robots. Uh, and they had these, this contest to see who could get the most ping pong balls. And that was really the time in which I was just fascinated by that, but it's still, you know, a kid from Missouri, it still wouldn't have been something that I would have even thought of, um, as an, as a possibility at all. I think a lot of times kids don't even realize the possibility and just how attainable so many things actually are. But I was lucky enough, I had a couple of teachers who had, and again, this is middle of nowhere in Missouri, but I had a couple of teachers who had

kids who went to MIT. I had another teacher who had, you know, was really, really kind of understood the whole college admissions process. And so what wouldn't have been even possible really came about because of, you know, a few relationships in my life. We have similar paths to a degree. Yeah. And I would say the similarities is not MIT. Okay. So I didn't go there, but the similarities is definitely a small town and an uphill battle to get to where you're at today, because that's my story. Like I grew up. I don't often tell this on the change law, mostly because Jared and I are together and we're kind of focused on the gas.

But in this case, we're kind of sharing some stuff here. But I grew up in this small town in southwestern Pennsylvania called Maxwell. You don't you probably can't even find it on the map. That's like it just doesn't get there unless you zoom all the way in. southwestern Pennsylvania called Maxwell. You probably can't even find it on the map. It just doesn't get there unless you zoom all the way in. That's when it matters is when you're all the way in on the zoom. I grew up poor, grew up in a place where opportunities weren't handed out. It was very much a blue collar type area. Everyone around me was blue collar and all I knew was blue collar. I never thought, ever thought that I would be where I'm at today.

And it was only by people around me, you know, influencing me every step of the way. And those influences are all unique in their own right. But it was all those incremental influencers throughout my life that got me to where I'm at. And it seems somewhat similar to your story. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that's true. I think one of the real key things for me in my entire life is just the key, just the value of other people and not just for the benefits you get, but for in and of themselves intrinsically for their own uniqueness and who they are. But, you know, Travis and I grew up with a third friend of ours, Ryan. Ryan ended up going to MIT the year before I did. You know, not a lot of kids from our high

school really ever went anywhere out of state for college. And so it was kind of a big deal that he blazed that path. And so Travis and I and Ryan grew up really good friends. And it's just, it's just strange sometimes how life works out where you've got good people around you that just rub off and become such good, such good positive influences. And it's, you know, it's, it's especially strange when it happens for the rest of your life.

So, you know, me, Travis and Ryan, we still, we still get together on a pretty regular basis and still, and still see each other pretty often. That's very cool.

So let's fast track a bit to, to Fonos. We're going to take a break here in probably a few minutes, but I want to tee up what, uh, what the core topic is here. Fawn Awesome 5 is where you're at now. You got a Kickstarter out there. You scratched your own itch to get here, you know, what was it five, six years ago that this was started?

How long ago did? Yeah, I think, I think it was, I think it was March of maybe 2012 when we first released Font Awesome. Okay. So it's a bit, four years and some change. So this is a widely used project. This is an open source project. I'm not sure yet of the stability in terms of money or sustaining or employment.

I know you have Fort Awesome, which I thought was actually a rip off. Now I find out that you're actually behind it. I had no idea that you were, so we'll break that open as well, but absolutely help us understand what fun awesome is. Give us the breakdown there. Well, and then we'll kind of, from there we'll go into our first break, but I'll lead you into that, but help me understand what fun awesome is. Yeah. So fun awesome is really a set of icons that everybody needs for their website. Helps you to easily put social media icons, maybe an up arrow or a home icon or a hamburger menu. Allows you to easily put that on your website and then style them the same way you would style with regular text. So Font Awesome is the same size, the same color, the same drop shadow of the text around it.

So you already know how to change it and how to style it. And as a bit of a bonus, it's also vector based. And so no matter how large you make those icons, no matter if you're on retina or not, they'll be perfect. This has come around to in an age where I think retina was just becoming more and more popular around 2012. Yeah. It was certainly there. I think version three was it? Version four of the iPhone was retina, first retina.

And then even then you had the iPads that weren't retina yet. I remember having a non-retina iPad and being like, oh, I've got to have a retina one. Cause that thing is so clear to see. And that's where it really, really matters to have like vectors, scalable font based, same size, those kinds of things for icon clarity on a website. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting. We got really lucky with the timing of a lot of what we were doing. Uh, retina was a huge, huge thing. We obviously had nothing to do with retina, uh, but we happened to have a product that was already sitting out there that would meet those needs really, really well. So that wasn't on purpose? That was sort of like by accident in a way? No, that was definitely not on purpose. That was largely by accident. I think part of it was that

just the inherent superiority of vectors in design, making it so easy to change it, that Retina was just a fallout of a lot of the other advantages that packaging icons into a typeface gave you. So here you are now, you're on, by the way, if you're still catching up and as I kind of am as well, but it's on GitHub. It's an open source project. You've got, to date, 46,000-ish plus stars, almost 8,000 forks. So people are forking this, making their own, submitting pull requests, things like that. There's lots of people watching this thing, almost 1,200 watchers.

The question before we go into the break is why open source? Why was that the way for this? Because it's been open source since day one, right? Yeah, it's been open source since day one. I think a big part of it is just kind of growing up with the mentality and learning as a designer and somewhat as a developer, having benefited from open source so much. I didn't see this as a business opportunity at all.

That's actually not really my background at all. Um, and so it just seemed obvious that this would be an open source thing. Um, and we were, you know, we were, we were doubly scratching our own hitch here because, uh, we were using an early version of, you know, back then it was called Twitter bootstrap. Now it's just bootstrap, but, um, the icons that they were including at the time were all raster based. So you'd have to pick the white color or the black color. And then they didn't scale up and they were a little brittle to work with. They were nice and a really, really small size,

but we decided for that first version to include every single icon that Twitter Bootstrap included, except for ours would be vector. They would be the same color as everything around it and would be really easy to control. And so between that and Retstrap included, except for ours would be vector, they would be the same color as everything around it and would be really easy to control. And so, you know, between that and Retina coming out, we got really lucky in terms of the timing of other products that happened to be out there

for how, you know, for where Fawn Awesome's success came from too. That's definitely a good place to break them. We'll come back and talk about that luck, so to speak. So let's break here, we'll come back and talk about that luck so to speak so let's break here we'll be right back linode is our cloud server of choice get up and running in seconds with your choice of linux distro resources and node location ssd storage 40 gigabit network intel e5 processors use the promo code changelog20 for a 20 credit two, two months free. One of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers is what we're building our new CMS on. We love Linode. We think you'll love them

too. Again, use the code changelog20 for $20 credit. Head to linode.com slash changelog to get started. We're back from our break with Dave Gandy, creator of Fawn Awesome. And it's open source, by the way. So you can go to FawnAwesome.io, check that out. And the top is a link, which we haven't really talked about much yet, is the announcement of Fawn Awesome 5, specifically the Kickstarter. It's a link to the Kickstarter. So we'll talk about that here in a bit. But Dave, before the break, you mentioned right place, right time, being lucky. What do

you mean by that? Yeah, I think that, um, I think in life, a lot of times, um, it's, it's sort of obvious that in order to get somewhere that you want to go in life, that you've got to be persistent and you've got to work hard. Um, and I think that that's, I think that's something that our, our community and, you know, the startup world in general is really, really acutely tuned into that hard work. You're not going to get good results without hard work. But I think the thing that the community has a hard time with is this notion that maybe, maybe that it's a combination of hard, hard work and luck. It's not one or the other, but it's this strange mix of both. And I think that that's definitely true in my case.

I mean, it's interesting. In trying to start a company out of really Fawn Awesome, we've been through a lot of iterations and a lot of different things. And so it's really cool to see the Fawn Awesome 5 Kickstarter doing really well. But there's a lot of hard work that goes into that. But in terms of luck, there's so many things that can't be attributed to your own

hard work. And I think that it's a little bit disingenuous sometimes to do so, but you've got to have both. You've got to have, for the really disproportionately sized success, you're going to have hard work and you're going to have luck. And you're not going to get nearly as much luck without a lot of hard work. But I think that they really, you know, they really go together. You know, when I think about this project, I think, you know, some of the things you just said there was you've had some iterations where you've, I'm not sure the exact words, but to a degree, trying to be successful or trying to, you know, turn it into not so much a business, but sustainability to a degree, trying to be successful or trying to turn it into not so much a business,

but sustainability to some degree. And I don't know if that equates to just simply making money or whatnot, but we'll get to your Kickstarter here in a bit. But I just want to tee this up saying that currently you're nearly half a million dollars in backers when your original request was just simply $30,000. So let's not go into that yet, but just for the listeners, like if you haven't gone to the Kickstarter yet, half a million dollars. So what I want to talk about here is how this began as an open source project, how you wanted to give back because you had already gotten so much back from open source. You were in the right place at the right time. You called it luck. You talked about Retina becoming a thing.

You talked about Twitter Bootstrap, not just called Bootstrap. The icon set there where they were rasterized, they weren't scalable like Fawn Awesome made available. Right place, right time, whatever. Let's talk about Fawn Awesome specifically, like getting to the piece where what were some of the things that you tried to do that I guess made it to what it is now? Not so much now, but like, you know, with

the Kickstarter, you're trying to make money, you're turning it into a business of some, some sort of a, you know, a money-making product that is also open source and has open source roots. Give me some of the, you know, the fails, the successes, the bloody knuckles along the way. What were some of those things for you? So a couple of years ago, Travis and I were working together at a different place. And Fun Awesome, those first two years had just continued to grow at a rate that wasn't really, we couldn't really ignore anymore. And so we started talking about, you know, maybe, you know, this is a way for us to continue to get to work together. I mean, for me, a lot of the motivation of starting a company is getting to work with the best people on Earth that I've ever met.

And I don't just mean people professionally. I mean, like as human beings, too. And so I'm I'm unbelievably proud of the team here that we've got at Fawn Awesome, of Travis Chase, of Rob Bedol, and Brian Talbot. We have a really, really just stellar and spectacular team. And I think for us, that's sort of the foundation of a lot of this is continuing to work with great, spectacular, amazingly talented people. And the business is sort of a vehicle for that, truthfully. And so some of the things that we've tried along the way, we've got what I think is a fantastic service called Fort

Awesome. If you actually look at the GitHub repo itself, the organization is Fort Awesome, and the project is Font Awesome. And that was always sort of a play there. Fort Awesome, the name itself comes from an old, old episode of news radio. Funny little, very memorable scene there. And so every place I had lived up until that point in life, I just referred to as Fort Awesome. I also ran across when I was living in Boston. I'd walk through Harvard Yard on my way to the subway a lot of times. And at one point, somebody had built this cardboard box fort in the middle of the winter and it's spray painted Fort Awesome on it. So I have this

spectacular photo from that as well. It's actually hanging in our office on the wall right now. And it's out there on the internet somewhere. You can probably track it down. But so Fort Awesome is something Fort Awesome was always the original organization that produced Font Awesome. And Rob was the one who came up with the idea of well instead of you know ford awesome what if you called it font awesome um so that's really where the the name itself comes from um so ford awesome we uh originally launched as a service called fonticons basically the big idea there is that uh just like helvetica is not the only typeface you need on the internet.

It's great and it's spectacular, but it's not the only one you need. Maybe you need a different look, a different style, a different feel to it. And we feel the same way about icons as well. Font Awesome is great, but sometimes it's not the exact look that you need. And there are lots of phenomenal, phenomenally talented icon designers out there. And so Fort Awesome is our attempt to bring a lot of those icon sets together into one place. And so on the site, you can mix and match your perfect icon set from the styles that you are looking for. You can upload your own.

You can actually serve typefaces and images from there as well now too. But that's, you know, that's been actually our big focus for the past several years on building out Ford Awesome. So is Ford Awesome, let's just put it in quotes here, successful? I mean, I think it's not bad. It's not anything that's going to, you know, employ four of us over the long term for the time being. But it's definitely enough to continue to invest into. I still think that that's where the puck is going eventually. I think that font awesome, I love font awesome, but I think that I think sometimes the style isn't perfect for your website all the time and you might need something else. I also think that performance is a huge, huge deal. And just serving the individual icons that your site

needs really helps out with performance. And when every second of load time cuts your conversion, whatever that conversion is, cuts it by 7%. That's a performance is really a lot more important than I think sometimes we prioritize it. So we're talking about fail successes, things that you've done along the way to iterate on essentially sustainability. How do these two play together then? So you got Ford Awesome, you got Fawn Awesome. Ford Awesome is the overarching org. Is it the LLC or the company, so to speak, that owns the copyright to Fawn Awesome?

That's what that acts as? Yep, it is. And so I guess as products, how do they parallel one another? Yeah, so really Fawn Awesome and Fawn Awesome Pro will be individual typefaces in that broader service. And so the way this is going to work is for everybody who supports the Kickstarter, if you're also a Ford Awesome customer or you become one, you'll have that entire set automatically added

to your library of icon sets so that you can use all of that to piece it together. You can also upload your own logos, your own individual sort of things that we may not have in the sets or that you want to be a little bit different. Coming back to open source, why do you think open source was a catalyst for this, as you said earlier, this popularity that you couldn't ignore anymore?

Yeah, I mean, truthfully, if we had made Font Awesome commercial from the get-go, and it was definitely an option to think about, if we'd made it commercial from the get-go, I think we would have just been spending a lot of time trying to make money off of it, and it would have just been kind of a distraction. And so I completely attribute its being open source to its broader success. But there's a lot that we don't have time to do on Fawn Awesome. There's a lot of great things that we want to add to it. And so that's really where the Kickstarter came out of. Fawn Awesome right now is about 675 icons as of its last release, which was 4.7. And we actually released 4.7 the same day that we launched the Kickstarter because we wanted to make it clear to the community that we're still very, very much focused on the open source and the free version of Font Awesome. That's where our roots are. That's never going to change. That said, our repo has many, many thousands of open issues on GitHub with icon requests. I attribute that to the reason that we just got the numbers from GitHub that last year,

Font Awesome had more contributors than any other open source project, full stop. We had more than anybody else. And I think that's because there's a real strong desire for so many different icons. But if you look at a lot of those requests, they're not necessarily something that a lot of people have, but it's a very strong need for a small set of people. And that's where we got this idea for Fawn Awesome Pro. Our stretch goals for every 25 grand that we raise, we make another icon set. We make another icon pack based on a specific category. And for every one of those categories, we add 10 of those to Fawn Awesome Free, and then we'll add another 30 to Fawn Awesome Pro. So this was really a way for us to completely

blow out the sheer number of icons before we really knew how great that demand was going to be. And so far, we've got 21 additional icon packs funded, and that's 21 in addition to the six that we were already planning for Fawn Awesome Pro. So 27 total icon packs, around 40 icons are popping there. That's a lot of icons. On the open source front, I'm kind of curious, as part of this popularity, as part of this catalyst, since you agree with my term there. Absolutely. curious as part of this popularity as part of this catalyst since you agree with my term there absolutely because that's what it seemed to me was like you know it had had fun awesome not been open source it it wouldn't have become what i would personally consider is like this standard for icons on the web like maybe even in terms of how their implementation are you know being a font now

the new version offering svg, the accessibility things you've done, you know, over in 4.6, and then the way you implement those in CSS and ultimately support preprocessors like LESS or SAS or, you know, what have you. I'm curious how the actual icons themselves, the libraries got supported and influenced by the open source community. So I know you've got, and I don't even know how you deal with this, but you've got 3,700 plus issues on your GitHub repository. So that's tons.

You know, you got almost 6,000 closed, but what's been the community's impact towards new icons? How does that play? Yeah, so as a matter of fact, the community itself is primarily what drives the new icons that we make in every single version. So we typically take a look at the most requested icons and we'll and we'll just, you know, kind of go off the list. And so, you know, the last release we did, there's a handshake icon that's been sitting there for far too long. I had actually tried to design it on three separate occasions, and it's just a really, really hard icon to design and make it readable at small sizes. But, you know, that had about

300 upvotes and we hadn't gotten to it yet. And so a lot of our issues that are really, really requested by a lot of people, you know, they may only have a hundred upvotes and we don't have time to get to it. And another part of the problem that happens when you're completely led by the community is that you end up with sort of some patchy support. And so you might have one handshake icon that's not outlined, one that is. You might not have all of the right matching icons in a particular theme. Because if you're doing individual requested icons, you sometimes miss that holistic picture. So right now, you know, we're adding icons primarily based on what the community is

asking for specifically. And so Fun Awesome 5 is going to give us a chance to go back and really consider the larger picture specifically around these icon, these themed icon category packs. When you say patchy support, do you mean technical support for sure? Not so much technical, like I'm going to help you support technical support, but more like technical in the font style or the icon style of technical, meaning that the actual icon you implement may have slight variations from variation to variation, basically. Absolutely. And so for instance, a lot of icons in Font Awesome will have a solid version of the icon.

They'll have an outline version. They might or might not have a version with a circle behind that object, or a square, or an outlined square. And so along the way, we're missing a few of them here and there, because as we did them one off, we didn't consider the entire system of how these work. And so the new version, you know, for every icon, we're going to have a solid version that's in font awesome free. And then in font awesome pro, there's going to be an outline version. And we

just hit the stretch goal recently to develop a thin outline style as well for each one of those icons. So there's, there's really a lot that goes into those different styles and having them all match and all be visually very cohesive so that when you put two very different icons next to each other, they still sort of feel like they go together. This seems like a very time-intensive project. Would you agree with that? Oh, absolutely. You know, I was just looking at the numbers so far and, you know, we're redesigning every single icon and funnel. So I'm free from scratch and all of the stretch goals that we've hit so far. We're looking at, you know, probably at least it takes us on average probably an hour to design every icon.

And so we're looking at probably a total of 3000 icons so far ish. It's going to take a little while. Yeah. It's very, very intensive. And the thin style, you know, it's possible that we could just change the weight and not really redesign the icon at all. But in order to get pixel perfection and in order to really get it on retina as well, every single one of those thin icons is going to need to be redesigned.

It's not just a variant of the regular outline. It's going to be completely redesigned as well. The reason why I ask about time intensivity is because with this many issues, with this kind of community interaction, with this kind of success built upon open source, the free time from so many people out there giving back to this project, to its success, getting to where it's at, that's a lot of time to do. And I'm thinking how in the world, you know, if you don't find ways to sustain, which is something we always try to come back to, especially when you have a project like this, that's that's that really requires so much time, not just from you and some other core leaders, but some of the community as well as like, how do you get to a point where you can actually

like keep giving your time without feeling like you've been overburdened or where you're like man i've got i got family i've got friends i've got life i've got work you know how do you keep giving to this and so i i say that to probably get to hopefully what might be the the next layer for this which is fun awesome five the kickstarter and all the things you're doing to get to the point we're at now. Yeah, I mean, it is a good bit of work. And there are a lot of people that have been really, really helpful along the way. One time I noticed on GitHub that there was another guy out there that was just really nicely and politely responding to issues. He was letting them know sort of the expectations we have for contributing guidelines.

He's just being like a really, really awesome community member and so we asked him, hey, do you wanna take on a more official role? And so Jeremiah's the guy that typically handles a lot of the day-to-day issues on the Font Awesome GitHub repo and I tell you what, that guy is prolific and he is unbelievably appreciated. So there is a lot that's going to go into

continuing to keep Font Awesome 5, continue to keep that free version updated and excellent. But a lot of it is, you know, if we can, you know, if we can figure out a way to eat, we can basically figure out a way to keep this alive and keep this growing. And so that's exactly what the Kickstarter was really sort of about was Fun Awesome has gotten some great success. But it looks like what people really want more of is more icons. And we're just not going to be able to get to the 3,000 requested icons on there.

So maybe we can figure out a way where we can make that work. Maybe we can figure out a way to where everybody can sort of get involved in this. And so as of today, we actually, the Kickstarter has just done so phenomenally, so much better than we expected that we had our original early backer goals for the first week. And we just opened those up to everybody for the rest of the Kickstarter campaign so that everybody can get Fun Awesome Pro for 20 bucks. Wow. I saw that and I was like,

that's really awesome to one, give the community a way to, because there's no one out there saying, hey, I want to keep using Fun Awesome totally for free, Dave. Keep working your butt off and the rest of the community can just keep doing what you're doing,

you know, with no way to, as you said, eat or no way that this is helping you eat. You know, keep racking up those issues. Keep giving me this free stuff. No one wants to say that. Everyone out there who's ever used Fawn Awesome to some degree wants to find some way to give you something to keep making this project awesome, which is a great pun there for this but um so 20 bucks now that you're talking about the kickstarter let's talk about that so yeah 20 bucks is the opening uh i guess you call them goals what you call them pledges goals yeah on kickstarter they call them pledges and so the uh the first pledge at the very top is for 20

bucks and that gets you the early backer price for fun awesome pro which we extended to the rest of the kickstarter um that license for pro uh includes it's an individual license or a small business license that covers up to 100 people at a company so we tried to make something we tried to make it really really flexible honestly um where it would be something that you know would be cheap enough that that everybody could could use and flexible enough in how it's used. I mean, trying to count based on the number of designers that are in your company or the number of the computers that it's installed on, I think that's kind of hard to keep track of.

So we're trying something new that we haven't seen before that we're trying to, is a way just to keep it simple. But what that license gives you is, it gives you the, you know, originally we were planning on having only a thousand more icons in Fawn Awesome Pro and a full SVG framework. And so this really allows us, you know, like I said, we've got 21 stretch goal icon packs that have been reached. That's going to be another, you know, seven, eight hundred icons right there. Who knows how many it'll be before the end of it.

And we're going to keep that. We're going to keep that 25, every, you 25, every $25,000 that's raised, there's another icon pack. Everybody gets that particular stretch goal. And we've got lots more stretch goals going on too. So we've got a set of duotone icons. This one's really, really fun. I've been itching to do this one technically for a while

because you can do it with, you can obviously do it with SVG, but you can also do it with icon fonts as well. So basically for the top 200 most popular icons in Font Awesome, we've got data from tens of millions of websites. So we actually know which icons people are using most. We're going to pick the top 200 of those and we're going to separate that out into layers. We're going to have one layer that's full opacity and one layer that's 50%. So that you basically can continue to get all the ease of use of Font Awesome

where it's the right color, but the other layer is going to be 50% opacity, so you get this awesome duo-tone multicolor effect out of it. Yeah, kind of like a layered effect even. Yeah, and so that's the first stretch goal. Then I'm going to be writing about our process for how we make this icon set. So designing icons is kind of a, is a meticulous business. And so this, we're putting out an ebook. We're going to collect all of the blog posts that we put together for this into an ebook and distribute that. We're making design plugins for Sketch, Illustrator, and Photoshop. We actually, when we hit the $300,000 goal, we decided to put basic SVG support into

Font Awesome 5 free so that we're giving back not just into the people who are supporting Pro, but to the whole community along the way as well. So Font Awesome free will have all of those icons will be bare SVG files so that you can use them in your sites if you want that way, or you can use them a little bit more easily on the desktop we're doing an icon subsetter where you've got a desktop tool that will allow you to select just the icons your site is using and will produce we'll make those files for you we also reached thin icon style as well so we've hit you know so many stretch goals so far and we really wanted to pace these out so that everybody wins along the way that's good let's uh we're getting close i just realized we're close to our next break.

I wanted to dive deep into Flawless and 5 and the Kickstarter, but we're going to do that right after this break. So we got two more stretch goals you didn't mention there. So when we come back from that break, we'll go into the next two, which is iOS and Android support. And this last one, which is Flawless and Pro CDN. We'll take this break real quick. We'll come back.

We'll dive even further into the Kickstarter. Find some five in these two additional stretch goals we haven't covered yet. So we'll break back. Hey, everyone. Adam Stachowiak here, editor-in-chief of Changelog. And I'm talking to a Rollbar customer. Rollbar puts errors in their place. Rollbar.com slash Changelog.

Check them out. Get 90 days of the bootstrap plan totally for free. I had a conversation with Paul Bigger, the founder of CircleCI, and he talked deeply about how they use Rollbar and how important that tool is to their developers. Take a listen. CircleCI is a continuous integration

and continuous delivery platform. Our customers are the developers in an organization. Developers rely on us heavily as part of their deployment workflow. So clearly, you know, you're like a part of the machine that should not break, could not, should not break, right? If you break, you're one, losing trust, you're losing value, and ultimately you're not delivering your brand promise. Let's talk about the obvious question here, which is, you know, how do you use Rollbar? So not just how do you use Rollbar, but why use Rollbar? So I was talking about doing continuous delivery there.

And one of the key parts about doing continuous delivery, you don't just have to test your software, but you have to constantly keep track of it. You're gonna be doing deploys 10 times a day or 20 times a day, and you have to know that each deploy works, and the way to do that is to have really good monitoring. And Rollbar is literally the thing that you need to do that monitoring. You need to make sure that every time you deploy, you're gonna get an alert if something goes wrong.

And that's exactly what Rollbar does for CircleCI for our infrastructure. So let's assume anyone listening to this is someone who needs to use Rollbar. Someone needs to know about this tool, needs to know about this product, needs to know how it's changed how you do business because of it. I'd like them to know how important this tool is to you. And a better question might even be, could you have done what you're doing with CircleCI without Rollbar's help? We operate at serious scale. And literally the first thing we do when we create a new service is we install Rollbar in it. We need to have that visibility. And without that visibility, it would be impossible to run at the scale we do.

And certainly with the number of people that we have. We're a relatively small team operating a major service. And without the visibility that Rollbar gives us into our exceptions, it just wouldn't be possible. If there's people out there who ship code without Rollbar, I can only imagine the pain that they're going through. Oh, that's awesome. Thanks, Paul. I appreciate your time. So listeners, we have a special offer for you. Go to rollbar.com slash changelog, sign up,

get the bootstrap plan for free for 90 days. That's 300,000 errors tracked totally for free. Give rollbar a try today. Head over to rollbar.com slash changelog. All right, we're back from the break with Dave. We're talking about Font Awesome 5 and specifically this Kickstarter. I mean, $30,000 as the initial goal. I don't know if you actually, if that was a, I'm about to ask you, was that a true real goal or did you really think you'd only do $30,000 as the initial goal. I don't know if you actually, if that was a, I'm going to ask you, was that a true real goal or did you really think you'd only do $30,000?

Is this half a million dollars you're at it right now with 29 days to go? Is that a complete and utter surprise to you and the rest of the team? Well, I'll tell you the truth. I think we were hoping for more than 30,000. But I mean, we were going to make Fawn Awesome five. You know, we asked ourselves, what's the number that we're making it anyway? And so really, we probably have made it anyway. But we wanted a goal that would be, you know, sort of reasonable, that we'd be perfectly

happy to do all this work, even if that's all that was meant. So that was really how we came up with that number. And so we took the tail end of that last break talking about the different stretch goals. And I think what's interesting to just clearly mention in case it wasn't clear enough mentioned by you is that each of these stretch goals are, you know, things that one, help you have more money to make sure that you all have the time and employment to be able to do this stuff and all that good stuff. But it's also giving back to the open source project, which is super cool.

Each of these stretch goals listed on your Kickstarter campaign, they're not just self-fulfilling for the people paying for them, they're also feeding back into the open source, open license version of this. But getting back to the two stretch goals we didn't mention, which haven't been met yet, which the next one that's close to being met, you're like maybe $45,000 away from your next stretch goal, which is the iOS and Android support, which means that you're going to have iOS and Android. You're going to be able to easily use Font Awesome Pro and those two different applications or those two different platforms.

And you also have Font Awesome Pro CDM. What are these next two stretch goals? Yeah. So these two stretch goals we've been talking about for a couple of days now. We had originally the first set of stretch goals that we had made were blown through in less than a day. And so we had to come up with a second set. Those have been completely passed through as well. And so this is our third set. We've got a couple more up our sleeve here, but the two here that we've got listed right now are iOS and Android support. Really, the idea behind this is that we've got a lot of people who use Font Awesome in mobile apps, and we wanted to make that just that much easier for them to use it. And another piece of that is when we meet that goal, we're going to open source

that same support for Fonawesome free as well. And so basically anybody making a mobile app will be able to use Fonawesome free completely easily, you know, and have not have to worry about anything. But for those that pay for pro, you're going to get access to all those extra icons for making your next mobile app. And the next one. Yeah, go ahead.

I was going to say in the CDN, I noticed that you're also a a user of mac cd and we love mac cd i think they recently changed their brand to stack path um so i'm not sure how you're changing your mentions back to that but we're huge fans of fastly around here our podcast is served by fastly so quick mention of that but uh what is the cdn what is this piece here, so this really comes out of another project of ours. About four or five months ago, we launched something that we called Font Awesome CDN. So it's completely free, and that bandwidth is all provided for free by Mac CDN. Mac CDN has really been there for us, particularly from the very beginning. And Justin Dorfman specifically was such a huge champion for developers.

We love Justin right here. Such a good guy. He's such a good guy. Yeah, another one of those guys that I just cannot speak highly enough of. So Font Awesome CDN, the notion of that really was we wanted people to be able to do things like update their version of Font Awesome without having to push any code. So you give us your email address. We send you a unique code that you can put on your website. And if you ever want to change it later,

you can come back in and update the version. You can turn on something that we developed that we're really, really proud of that we called auto-accessibility. And you can control async. You can actually do CSS or JavaScript. There's so many auto accessibility and you can control async. You can, there's just, you can actually do CSS or JavaScript. There's so many different things that you can do with that. And so Fonawesome CDN completely free to everybody to use.

And the, really the idea there was that's been such a helpful thing. A lot of people are, you know, so many people have signed up for that and are using it actively that we wanted to do something very similar for Fonawn Awesome Pro. Right now, you can download the files, but then you'll have to serve them yourself, which for a lot of people really isn't a problem. But that's not everybody who uses Fawn Awesome. So we wanted a solution that was just as easy to use as Fawn Awesome CDN was. And so you'll be able to, if we reach that goal, we're going to give everybody access to a year of Fawn Awesome Pro CDN so that they can easily serve up their icons. And we're going to make it easy for them

to just load the specific icon packs their site is using so that they can keep their pages small and fast loading because we know how important that is. So this comes back to that icon subset where you can just choose the ones you're using and then obviously serve them not so much from your own disk, from your own server, but from the CDN that you're providing with Fawn Awesome Pro CDN. Or is it, it says Fawn Awesome Pro CDN in the stretch goal. Is it Fawn Awesome CDN or is it Fawn Awesome Pro CDN?

It'll be the same underpinnings of the way that we're doing Fawn Awesome CDN, but it Font Awesome Pro CDN? It'll be the same underpinnings of the way that we're doing Font Awesome CDN, but it's specifically for serving up Pro. Since Pro is a commercial icon set, we wanted to make it have a way where it's really, really easy, sort of like other commercial typefaces might get served up with Typekit or a similar service. Right. So it says there we're giving all Pro backers a year of service.

So those people that back at that $20 level that initial level they're going to get this once you hit this stretch goal so it's like that that first initial uh pledge of 20 bucks keeps getting sweeter and sweeter as the amount goes up you know in terms of this kickstarter yeah i mean that was really the idea here uh you know we're we we're engineers and we're designers at heart. And so the success of this has been really such a fun thing for us to basically, you know, think about all of those problems that we know about and we hear about and have for ages. And now we've got a way to fund a lot of those solutions. And so that's what's been really, really fun. Phonosom Pro CDN, I'm particularly excited about. The icon subsetter is really designed for our real tweakers,

our developers there who really have a lot of time to be able to spend on performance. We wanted to do something a little less granular with being able to load just the icon packs. So the subsetter, you can choose individual icons. Phonosom Pro CDN, you'll be able to pick the major icon packs so that even people who may not be able to handle, you know, some command line tools very well will still be able to keep their

website pretty slim and speedy. Let's talk about this video. I mean, I don't know how you did it. I don't know if this was, I want to know the intentionality behind this thing, because this video alone is reason enough to give you 20 bucks. I mean, I don't even care if I get fun. Awesome. Just I'm so thankful for like the creativity behind this. I want to know the story like because Kickstarter like they leave with the video, right? If you don't have a slamming video that tells your story in the most compelling way and that varies by you know by project then you may be

just dead dead in the water it but in my opinion you absolutely grand slam this thing like this is by far the coolest best video for faun awesome i didn't expect it i thought it was you as the main character for a bit because i see the pixelated dave and i don't know you personally so i haven't seen your face so to speak uh besides the avatar you carry around but i may have seen a picture of you but i don't know you know all your characteristics i thought this was you what is the story behind this video yeah so um i mean if you want to see me and you want to see just how bad a kickstarter video is that i start in uh go look at our our old project Font Awesome Black Tie. It was a different

looking icon set. They came in multiple weights. But that's me on that video. It's me. I'm just dangerous enough with a camera, with an SLR to be able to shoot a decent video. And that's what it looks like when we do it. So we learned pretty well last time that, oh my goodness, this is not our wheelhouse. So we've got to have somebody else look at it. And, you know, I got to say, you know, we did Y Combinator last summer and that the community of folks at Y Combinator are just so helpful and so spectacular. And so another one of the Y Combinator startups called Video Pixie is a place where you can go and you basically give the details about your project. And then all of these professional, you know, professional editors and writers and people who shoot the video can can basically bid on your project.

And so, you know, with some help from Thomas there at Video Pixie, we found a company called Knox Avenue. And they're in Los Angeles. And they are just some of the most phenomenally talented people you can ever expect. I mean, so, you know, we were originally looking at sandwich video. And sandwich video, you'll see them out there for a lot of big name projects. I think Slack has a video made by Sandwich. And they produce absolutely amazing content. But their prices these days start at a quarter of a million dollars because they're just really, really good. A lot of money, yeah.

A lot of money, but you know what? If you've got it, they are spectacular. So honestly, Knox Avenue is probably just as good, but they're just not famous yet. They're just, you know, they're a little younger. I don't know. After watching the video, I would say not just as good. I would say as good for yet they're just you know they're they're a little younger i don't know after watching the video i would say not just as good i would say as good for sure i'm familiar with sandwich video i love them too but i think that this video is is by far phenomenal i mean i just did a great job doing this for you thank you i mean we we had so much fun writing you know and being out there for the shoot um it was it was great so i you know So I, you know, I, it was in Burbank, right? You said it was in California. They, they, yeah, this particular,

this particular bakery, which I don't even know how, how they found this place. This is, I could not imagine a better place to shoot this. That's not a set. That's an actual bakery. Wow. Okay. And it's just gorgeous naturally. And it just works on camera so well. Um, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's, it's called Half Baked. And, you know, they're in Burbank. And this place is just gorgeous. And so, you know, I went out there for the weekend doing the shoot. And, you know, in typical low budget, you know, Los Angeles, you know, starving actor style.

The shoot started at 6 p.m. and it went until 6 a.m. You know, and these people, they're they're used to it. You know, there are probably 20 people all told between between the actors, the extras, the you know, the director of photography that, you know, the actual it was just there was just so many people and so much stuff going on. And these guys are so talented and they're so good. And we had so much fun trying to put as much personality into that script as we could. Um, you know,

we're, we're huge nerds. Everybody at font awesome. We are huge nerds. Um, and we really enjoy just, you know, trying to put that in every little corner of everything that we do.

Um, and the script in the, in the video is just really kind of a, an example of that. I love how it opens up and it's like, you can always add, add more sprinkles. I mean,

that's, I mean, the opening alone was, was enough. I mean, it is up and it's like you can always add add more sprinkles i mean that's i mean the opening alone was was enough i mean it is amazing and now that you said uh half baked in burbank the bakery there i went ahead and scroll back to uh 106 roughly in the video where he's i forget the guy's name on the outside he's like you changed the recipe he's like no we didn't change the recipe he's like this angry customer outside and he says it again you changed the recipe no no man we didn't change the recipe you know that and he kind of gets sweet and he kind of calms down but in that in that shot you can see half and then the b of bait and you can kind of see their logo in the in the window so you can even see they made a cameo of your you know of this that's pretty cool you know and and uh the guy

who stars in the video rob michelson uh he ad-libbed so so many little bits and pieces in there that you know we didn't have originally in the script and he's just so funny um and and you know that that part at the beginning the you know you can always add more sprinkles but that was him ad-lib was that him oh man that's so good i made a that. I was like, I want to mention that you can always add more sprinkles. Yeah, we, we, yeah, Rob was just, was absolutely spectacular. And my other favorite sort of secret star in the video, uh, is a guy named Albert who was just such fun to hang out with that whole, that whole evening. Um, he's the baker. Uh, he's the guy at the very end sort of dancing in the background. And he, you know, he shows up sort of throughout the video in random places, but he's,

he's my favorite sort of little, you know, secret hidden thing in there. He's, he's spectacular too. So I guess what, what I'm, maybe this isn't exactly pertinent to Fawn Awesome 5, but I think this is just shows to your level of commitment and your attention to detail is the stellarness of this video. And while it may not be you and the fun, awesome team, particularly shooting the video, editing the film, you know,

doing all the script writing, uh, that you had a phenomenal team that to work for this and do, and do this with you. Like, it's just so good. Like when I watched it for the first time, the first thing I said to

the ChangeLog team, I was like, because Justin was coordinating this call with you and helping us meet up with you and help telling your story. And I went to the Kickstarter, of course. The first thing I did was watch the video because that's what you do. And I was just like, you got to check this out. The video is amazing.

And we have our own films piece to Change log here to call change low films, of course. And we like do fun stuff. So we always love to see people get creative with film. And so I was immediately like hooked. And I don't know anybody else out there who feels the same way I do. But if you go to the Kickstarter and you see this video, it's by far like, I love how it says, you know, it talks about the staleness of version four. So you're kind of like, again, negative self-talk, some self-deprecation there. And that was three years ago, version four kind of got stale. How

do they get stale? Well, this and that, and it kind of names all these different things. And it says in all this fun stuff, I just, I think the video is awesome. I'm kind of rambling, but the video is awesome. I love it. Thanks. I think the first time that Travis saw an early cut of that video, and this is before a whole lot of work was even finished on it, he was nearly in tears. Really? When it was all done, he said, you know what?

That video may be the best thing we ever do. So I thought that was, at that point I was like, all right, I think we're doing all right here at this point. So, you know, just, I got one more thing I want to mention or to talk about in depth, which shouldn't be at the tail end, and I'm sorry it is, but it's the SVG framework you talked about. But before we go there, I want to ask you one thing on this front, is the measure of the cost of the video.

This is pre Kickstarter. So this is like initial investment, so to speak, like this is you banking on having to do something capitalistic, you know, your own capital into it to get to the point where you can actually say, Hey world, here we are, here's our plan. Come support us. Was it scary to make that choice? I mean, it was a little bit, um, you know a little bit. You know, we've taken a small amount of funding, you know, over the past few years. And, you know, we really are really conscious about trying to stretch that as far as possible. And this was a, you know, the video, it was cheap for what we got. But it was, you know, there was a good bit of money that went into that.

And so, yeah, it was definitely a nerve you know, a nerve wracking thing to, you know, to put this much up and, you know, to, for our company that we didn't know personally, you know, for, for Knox Avenue to shoot, you know, shoot this for us and help us write it. Um, but I tell you what, like, you know, as soon as we, um, started working with them, it just became obvious that not only, not only was this going to easily be worth our money, this was just going to be better than we could have ever hoped. So, yeah, I think we're just really, really happy with how things turned out. Real quick, what was our name again so I can make a note of it for the show notes? Knox Avenue Films.

Knox Avenue Films. So I'm going to assume that's K-N-O-X Avenue, right? Correct. I'm sorry. Googling it now. Going to add it to the show notes before we move on to the next topic. Sweet. Knox-Avenue.

We've got you. Knox-Avenue.com. Cool. We're going to add that to the show notes. So if you want to call them to work on your project, then now they're famous if they weren't already famous. So sad that this is the last thing we're talking about, but the SVG framework, what is this? Is it something that will be its own open source repo?

What's the story behind it? You mentioned eBooks and blog posts earlier and stuff like that, but what is this SVG framework that you're talking about? So the SVG framework, so the $300,000 stretch goal was to put basic SVG into font awesome free. And so all those SVG files are going to be there, they're going to be, you know, really easy to use individually, the framework, the really the idea behind this framework is, there are some great

advantages to SVG. But they're a little trickier to work with. You know, once you have it figured out, it's great. And you've got a great system going. But for some people, it's a little more complicated than Font Awesome is, which is dropping a single line of code on your website and you're good to go. So we wanted to take that same ease of use of Font Awesome and bring it to SVG. So if you want SVG, if you want your icons to be the same color naturally as the text that's next to it, there's some good stuff you can do. But we also wanted to be able to do things like size and drop shadow, and a lot of those additional CSS features that you also get with icon fonts,

we wanted to bring that same ease of use and that same power to SVG. So that's really our vision behind that SVG framework, which is a part of Pro and is for all of the Pro backers. So is it something that needs its own repo, or is it just simply a way of doing things? There's going to be enough code behind it. In order to pull it off, we're going to need some bits of JavaScript. And so Rob Mandel, our local JavaScript master, is going to be doing a good

portion of that. It could have its own repo, that's possible, but I think it'll just be a part of the Font Awesome Pro repo. So all of our backers, something we didn't mention, is that for everybody who's a backer, we're going to have a private repo where everybody can have access to the code and they can follow along in our development, our alpha, beta, pre-releases, all of that along the way, people can follow along.

We'll be getting input from people on specific issues, on which icon categories we're developing, all along the way. And so the code for that is going to be in that same repo. And earlier you mentioned that you've got a couple more things up your sleeve in terms of stretch goals, maybe tease us. Can you share some stuff here with the listeners? What's a stretch goal that isn't listed that may be listed?

What's some ideas you have? Yeah, so one that's going to, and the reason that a lot of these aren't listed there yet is because um and they're a little bit higher dollar value on them is because they're going to take a lot of effort for us to do well we don't typically like to do projects that we can't do just phenomenally well and so one of those that i'm really excited about is a community website so it's basically a place where everybody who's a part of Font Awesome can go and interact, help us vote specifically on icons. We can use GitHub to be able to do voting on icon, but it's not the greatest interface.

We also want to make it easier for people to have access to the latest versions and have a forum where people can help each other out. Really a more dedicated place that we'll hang out at and that we'll answer questions on as well, where the entire community can get together and help each other out. And that sleeve you mentioned that up your sleeve, what I think is interesting, it seems that all these stretch goals were born out of back to the open source piece of this back to the community you mentioned is sort of like deep in these roughly eight or 9,000 ish issues between the closed and the open.

So I'm assuming that most of what you're pulling out of this, this hat you've got is, is from what the community has already asked for. So this, you know, four years of history is, is playing to the future benefit of, of this Kickstarter.

And then also kind of playing to the stretch goals that you're, you're creating. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's absolutely true. We, you know, we listen to everything people say positive or negative. And we, you know, we internalize that. And that's you're exactly right. That's where all of these stretch goals are coming out of. So aside from going to FawnAwesome.io

and clicking on the banner that shows up in the top for the Kickstarter and going to learn about that and potentially becoming a pro backer at $20. It's still open source, so you don't have to pay to play. What are some ways for Fawn Awesome collectively as the open source piece, what are some ways the community can step in and help out? I know you've got so many issues. You mentioned, Jeremiah, earlier how that person was you know playing a great role just naturally in issues and kind of graduated to a role that was a bit more formalized you know things like that where can people listen into this

that that absolutely little fun awesome loved hearing this story of yours and just thinking Dave Travis rest of the team how can I step in and help out? What places can they go to do these things? Yeah, the issues there, the more that people help out, the more that they kind of know the community and help out there naturally, that is absolutely so unbelievably helpful. Jeremiah does so much work on that and we'd love to be able to give him a little bit of help out there. I think there are some other places too. There are stack overflow issues that we'd love to be able to give him a little bit of help out there. I think there are some other places too. There are stack overflow issues that we never get to if people want to start helping out with those.

There's really just so many places of people asking for help on Fawn Awesome we just don't have time to get to. Those are really, really helpful for us. And some of it might be helpful to get the word out about the Kickstarter. The more that we are able to do with the Kickstarter, the more that we're able to put back into Fawn Awesome Free and into Fawn Awesome Pro. You know, and that's a huge thing for us. There are places also where companies can get involved helping out. One of our rewards that we've got on here is folks can get their company logo added into Font Awesome Free and to Font Awesome Pro.

So there are really kind of ways for everybody at a lot of different levels to get involved where it can all give back to the community. I think it's interesting that your logo and Font Awesome Free and Pro, because it's a form of marketing. It's a form of support. So it's a form of donation. So you kind of give a little, you get a little so much as a, so to so it's a form of donation so you kind of give a little you get a little so much as a so to speak as a company so like let's say there's a very large company out there 50

million users uh using font awesome either as a base for for the icons they're creating or just straight up using font awesome you know this is a way for them to honor the open source piece of this, your time, Travis's time, and the rest of the team's time making this possible, and also the community's time, triaging these issues, supporting the community, helping out, being helpful, writing documentation, caring about accessibility, which is something we didn't get to talk about, which we've only got two minutes left, so we can't, but we could if you really wanted to. It's in there. Check out auto accessibility and check out all the accessibility changes we made in 4.6. We're really, really proud of those. Yeah, in version 4.6, you did that. So, I mean, this is a way for those companies to go to the

Kickstarter and say, hey, you know what? I'd like to get a little and give a little that's, that's really awesome. That's a, I like that. I guess. Yeah, we got two minutes. Tell me more about the accessibility. I know that this is really important for icons in general, because when we redid changelog.com recently, one of the things that we ran into with, with some of the things we had done, we had done some branding around like what we call sub brands, so to speak. So podcasts, films, news, things like that.

When we, um, when we roll that out into the design, we had some issues where, well, it's, it's an icon. It doesn't say what it is. So can you talk a bit about the, uh, give me kind of the high level overview of, of accessibility and what it means to you for font awesome, but specifically how you implement it in 4.6. Yeah. And let me first shout out,

like the reason that 4.6 was able to have such great accessibility improvements is another place that the community got involved. We had so many folks who know so much more about that world than we do. And we, you know, we kind of through the issues, we're able to get so much feedback on them that we're really, really happy with where it came.

But, you know, the big thing on icons is, are they of semantic value or are they just decorative? Yeah. If they're just decorative, all you got to do is throw an ARIA hidden equals true tag on the icon and you're good to go. Uh, if they are semantic, um, there's, there's extra stuff you need to do. And we added some more support for that. Uh, if you're using font, Awesome CDN, we have a feature called auto accessibility, that all you need to do on the icon, if it does have semantic value is throw a title on it. So if this represents, you know, hours left, or time of day, or whatever you throw title equals time of day, and then the screen reader will see that. So we tried to we really tried to make it as simple as possible.

I think a lot of the times that people, the reason people don't get accessibility, right. You know, like me, the reason is because they just don't know. And there's so many things to know about it. And it's a, you know, it's, it's unbelievably important to do well, but sometimes it doesn't pop the priority stack for folks. And that's why we wanted to invest as much as we could to make it as easy as possible so that your icons and your site are accessible to everybody. That's awesome. We all need that. We all care about accessibility. And I think it's awesome that you made it a priority to implement it in 4.6. And then also the different, there's a

stretch goal too that adds to it. You said there's a new font pack coming around accessibility. Is that right? Or there was one in 4.6, but there's a stretch goal too that adds to it. You said there's a new font pack coming around accessibility. Is that right? Or there was one in 4.6, but there's more added. Yeah, that was another piece of 4.6. So now that we've got, we've actually got a full set of accessibility specific icons to represent a full gamut of what's needed there. So definitely check those out. And that was another thing that we got a lot of feedback

from the community on to make sure we were doing it right. cool well i know i got to ask you a lot of stuff uh about your history about fun awesome history about where this is going the kickstarter the video and everything in between but uh i may have missed something so if i missed something this is your chance to share it what what what if i haven't asked you what would you like to share with the community before we tell this show you know, I think so much of just a complete and total satisfaction in life comes from the people that you surround yourself with. And so I cannot bank enough the team that we've got at Fort Awesome for Travis Chase, Rob Madol, Brian Talbot. And those guys are just spectacular. I mean, I, again, I, so, you know, I cannot speak highly enough about those guys as well. Um, and I am so, so, uh, I mean, lucky is

not exactly the right word. Um, but to be working with those guys, they are absolutely spectacular. I would put our team of four, uh, up against any in the world to ship and deliver usable software on time. That is awesome. That is very awesome. And I think the best way to close this might be just to simply say you can always add more sprinkles, right? Always. Always add more sprinkles. Well, Dave, it was a pleasure to meet you, have this time to chat with you, talk through

this big piece of your life, this awesome open source project, the next phase of it, Fun Awesome 5, the Kickstarter and I still can't believe I'm going to go back to the tab real quick here before we tail off is your rate now because the interface is live updating is $456,000 as of the recording. So we're recording this on November 1st

mid-afternoon roughly. You got 29 days to go. We're going to put the link to this Kickstarter in the show notes. If you're just listening now and you don't feel like going to the show notes, go to funawesome.io. There's a banner at the top, whether you're on mobile or desktop. You'll see that. Click that.

Go to the Kickstarter. Watch the video first because you have to. But keep in mind also the goal that you're at. I mean, I think it's just phenomenal to see this kind of support and just to see this kind of success for this project for you and then what it's going to actually do for the community. So congrats to you and the team. But that is it for this show here.

So I want to say thanks to all the listeners tuning in. You're awesome. We love you. Justin Dorfman, dude, you're awesome. Thank you for the hug at All Things Open. Thank you for connecting us to Dave and this story and helping us connect with him and share this story. Because we think that more people need to hear your kind of story, Dave. What do you think? I mean, you got an awesome story, right? I mean, I definitely appreciate hearing that.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I think your story is awesome. I think the truth is that everybody's got a story inside of them. That's true. And that's kind of the, that everybody's got a story inside of them. That's true. And that's kind of the, the, that's us in a nutshell. We believe that everybody out there has a story to tell in open source and a developer, designer, imposter, not an imposter, you know, self deprecating, negative self-talk, whatever you do, dude, you're awesome. And I thank you for all

you've done here and listeners. We also thank you for, uh, for tuning awesome. And I thank you for all you've done here. And listeners, we also thank you for tuning in. But Dave, that is it for this show, man. So let's say goodbye. Thanks for having me on The Change Log. I feel I'm just really, really humbled to be in such good company. I really appreciate it. The feeling is mutual, Dave. Thank you.

All right. Have a good one. We'll see you next time. I'm out.