Icon designers have been saying this for years.<p>For small icons, you really want to tune every pixel. Vector sounds great in theory (infinitely scalable!) but it just ends up being a blurry mess at small sizes.
>The above test is using Modern Pictograms and Safari. subpixel-antialiased is too blurry, antialiased is too thin. If anyone can find a goldilocks solution that would be great.<p>Render the whole shebang twice (including the background), once with "subpixel-antialiased", and once with either "antialiased" or "none". The latter should be in a div in front of and aligned with the subpixel version, and with an `opacity` value of your choosing, probably somewhere around 80%.<p><i>Edit:</i> Maybe closer to 60%.
I am trying hard to see the point of this article. Is he suggesting that we stop using fonts as icons for buttons and menus? Or assuming that if we did use them, we wouldn't have the good sense to ensure they look essentially the same across the board? If your argument is "they don't look good at X size": don't use them at that size. And don't bother using sprites, either because the milage will vary greatly. If your argument is "they have a huge kb footprint": don't use web fonts that suck.<p>For every negative (so far, just one or two) point against @font-face, I can find 2 or 3 positive, more important points. Creating time-wasting sprites with multiple colors and then a giant section in my stylesheet aligning all of these "icons" is bullshit compared to the simplicity of @font-face.<p>If this anti-@font-face banter is by purists, you don't really understand what a <i>purist</i> is, or your definition is wildly obsolete.