New site is online... still a few bugs to work out, but really liking the Ghost blog platform. Will take a while to copy all the old posts over.
I forgot how far back these posts go and I rarely ever post. Guess this blog has been up for a few years now (2011?).
This is a large update: 62 new icons, MaxCDN sponsored CDN, and the boostrap getting started guide. That is not even the big news. Google IO was going on last week and did a serious update on their design tools. Along with a lot of additions around their stock icon set.
The 62 new icons brings the total community count up to 582 icons. Since there are no breaking changes in v1.1.34 or any going forward the pack has lost the beta tag. This means as far as I know the set is stable for any of your production applications. I've been using them in production for the last month on client projects and it has gone smoothly.
The CDN was requested constantly and was actually a feature I needed myself for use in codepen.io examples. MaxCDN that is sponsoring the CDN made the process very easy.
The below link can be used to access the recently released 1.1.34 webfont package. The root of each version contains the preview for that release.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdn.materialdesignicons.com/1.1.34/css/materialdesignicons.min.css">
One of the stories in my backlog for the last month has been building out a getting started guide specific to Bootstrap users. I work with bootstrap every day and while it's easy to plug the icons in having small snippets of CSS to quickly correct icon positioning can save a lot of time.
Eventually these CSS rules will be adapted into the materialdesignicons.css stylesheet. For now to facilitate easier updates and bug fixes they will be separate.
To say google has upgraded their design tools and documentation is an understatement. They have completely upgraded most of their guidelines and tools with the goal of speeding up development. The new icon page is a good example of how a quick export option will greatly speed up developers.
The design examples for the system icons also got a pretty lengthy addition. This will ensure consistent icon additions. I'll be going through previous icons correcting them to match.
Google Design has added an additional 80 icons to the pack which will be added in this next release. Follow GoogleDesign on twitter to learn about new additions.
It has been in the planning stages (and partially coding stage) for a while. The icon set is just growing at a rate that is not practical as a single webfont. The current release tops at 60kb for the woff2 compressed webfont. This is only 1134 icons. Between Google Design adding new icons and the community users will need a way to produce smaller more tailored webfonts.
Subsetting icons requires many new features to be added to the site. These new features are a few releases out, but with each release will become more important.
With 289 issues closed and 107 open issues there is a lot of things to talk about. Please +1 any issue you like. Right now prioritization is completely biased to my judgement.
The Material Design Icons' site and webfont has gone into beta. Development will continue as normal, but at this point the icon set and features should be production ready.
In the beta the goal will be to address bugs as they come in as people start to integrate the icons with their projects.
Thanks for all the support during the development.
Note: There are many icon requests that are being processed. This is not a first come first queue, and it could take a while to process all the icon requests. If an icon is rejected it may still be created and attached to the issue.
This weekend Material Design Icons got updated with a new history page that will detail all the additions to the pack and various milestones.
Most importantly this page will inform users of icon modification in between the webfont releases.
Changes to existing icons are represented by a light purple. These entries have a compare button to see a before and after along with a visual overlay of the two icons. Often icon changes are subtle, so the overlay will make these changes much more obvious than a side by side comparison.
One last update a little off topic, the twitter account MaterialIcons is now active, so be sure to follow it for updates.
Thanks to those that submitted bugs. Please submit any issues you find or icon requests to the issue tracker on GitHub.
Starting with version 0.7.33-alpha the webfont has been rewritten. This new font generation makes use of the node only compilation possible in the grunt-webfont grunt package. This means that once I release the download link for the webfont safe SVG files any user can compile their own subset of fonts locally.
bower install mdi and view the preview.html or direct download.
Note: The SVG files that can be downloaded by right clicking on an icon in MaterialDesignIcons.com will not work. This is due to optimization steps that convert to SVG only features (most notably the arc ability that cuts down the file size 20 percent). The grunt-webfont generator relies on outside open source packages that do not support this specific command.
Alpha Status: Just a reminder this is all still in alpha. While stable, expect icons to be renamed without notice.
I'll start working on the tutorial today on how to compile subsets of the font yourself. Eventually the site will support this feature also, but requires a bit of coding time.
One last note a new contributor has joined, REjack, so keep the icon requests coming.