Add custom icons to Font Awesome

In one of my recent projects I used Font Awesome as icon set but I needed to add a new icon not included in the standard Font Awesome's library, the DuckDuckGo logo 🦆

After some research I discovered that Font Awesome allows you to add custom icons in addition to what's offered and in this tutorial I'll show you how to extend Font Awesome in 3 simple steps keeping your code clean.

1) First of all create a folder called myicons and add your icon definition inside a js file (fa-duckduckgo.js in my case)

export const faDuckDuckGo = {
  prefix: "fab",
  iconName: "duckduckgo",
  icon: [
    24,
    24,
    [],
    "e001",
    "M12 0C5.373 0 0 ... .616.484z"
  ]
};

prefix and iconName are respectively the icon group (fab -> Font Awesome brands in this case) and the icon name, so that you can render the icon in this way

<i class="fab fa-duckduckgo"></i>

the icon section contains the SVG viewbox (24, 24 in this case), the unicode point which represents this custom icon (e001) and the single-path SVG.

2) Create an index file myicons/index.js to export your custom icons

export { faDuckDuckGo } from "./fa-duckduckgo";

3) Install fontawesome-svg-core package

yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core

to make your custom icons available in Font Awesome.

import { library, dom } from "@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core";
import { faDuckDuckGo } from "./myicons";

library.add(faDuckDuckGo);

dom.watch();

In the code above your custom icons gets imported from the myicons module you created before and then added to Font Awesome's library. dom.watch method watches the DOM for any additional icons being added or modified.

Here you can play with the final demo!

Pssst... if you use TypeScript you need to use some types from fontawesome-svg-core as you can see in this example.

Comments

[Kaushik Varanasi]

This helped me in my project. Thanks for sharing.

[ffex]

Nice and useful article! I want to use it in an angular project, it is possible? I don't know how to reference the ts in the project.

[Iain Munro]

I was hoping that this would be a good article, but it lacks one thing and it is critical, is how do you now make it work. How do you connect the files we just made ?

80% of the work done - what was the point ?

[Andrea Stagi]

Hi Iain, have you tried the example attached? c63px.csb.app/

[ssandison]

I think he's asking how do you build the custom font awesome library to replace the standard font awesome library.

[Sissi Adamski]

nice tutorial, just on thing is a bit unclear to me. what is the purpose of "the unicode point which represents this custom icon (e001)" - thx!

[Andrea Stagi]

Hi Sissi, it represents the Unicode value for the icon and e001 is a higher number than the highest Unicode used in FontAwesome. If you have more than one icon and Unicode value is relevant for you, then you have to assign a different Unicode value for each icon (e001, e002 ...).

[Israel Robles]

This is a very useful article, thanks.

[Andrea Stagi]

Thank you 😊

[mnemos]

Nice article!

[Andrea Stagi]

Thanks!