How Font Awesome 5 Became Kickstarter’s Most Funded Software Project

Honestly I've gotten so much value from Font Awesome over the years that it was great to finally support the project – I have a feeling others felt the same way.

Font Awesome was already well known to developers and designers before Kickstarting, so it's no surprise its campaign is a success. If Bootstrap made a crowd funding campaign for instance, it would be as the same level if not more as Font Awesome. Obviously one wants to launch a campaign when a project has some big momentum, not when it's declining.

Hey folks! I&#x27;d love to answer any questions folks might have about running the Kickstarter or Font Awesome in general!<p>-Dave Gandy

&gt; Those icons are Font Awesome 4.7, which is completely open source so you can do almost whatever you want with them.<p>Pro vs Free still bothers me. Couldn&#x27;t one of the stretch goals been to make all fonts free and open?

$15K to make a proper video for kickstarter?<p>This is kind of defeating the purpose?<p>I mean - there&#x27;s prob. another $5K in expenses + all the work ...<p>That&#x27;s a lot of risk - which is what it takes to be competitive?

This is interesting:<p>&gt; <i>believe it or not, trolls are a sign you’re onto something. You’ve upgraded from indifference to dislike (or outright hate).</i><p>Things that are new and useful create resistance, which is actually a sign there is <i>something</i> instead of nothing.

I&#x27;m curious where the costing came from (since $30k barely pays a good designer for a few months). The reason for asking is that I&#x27;m wondering why the original goal wasn&#x27;t higher? Is it really that you didn&#x27;t forsee that level of support? This is a common reaction from startups that are amazed that their $10k goal suddenly spiraled into millions. Often the reaction is to add lots of unrealistic stretch goals which delay the project.<p>As for most backed, I think relaxing the early bird deals clinched it for a lot of people (including myself). I have a lot of respect for Kickstarters that offer a flat pricing for the base product.

Either I&#x27;m missing something (not uncommon) or, whoever claims this is the most funded software project seems to believe video games aren&#x27;t software.<p>Star Citizen ($2,134,374) and Double Fine Adventure ($3,336,371) leap to mind.<p>I&#x27;m actually very slightly surprised to hear that there&#x27;s no non-game software kickstarter that&#x27;s raised more than $891,989.

The best part about webfonts is you can block them, glad they decided to do SVG.<p>&gt;900 requests blocked on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles.fortawesome.com&#x2F;how-font-awe...." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles.fortawesome.com&#x2F;how-font-awe....</a>. and rising by 1 every second. Quite aggressive font fetching script doesnt seem to get the hint.

Glad to see SVG is an option. The icons are great but icon fonts are dead at my shop (mostly for the reasons Github abandoned them).

I bet they did something besides this. How did they get people to VISIT THEIR PAGE on kickstarter? Were they featured on KS front page? Featured elsewhere? How did the word of mouth spread? THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO KNOW

Wow, I would have backed this. There&#x27;s much useful insight in the article I wish other KS would heed - especially regarding stretch goals; I&#x27;ve seen soo many KSs derail because they, in desperation, added stretch goals that they could execute. (But I&#x27;m done done done with KS; I&#x27;ve suffered too many burns and scams).

At the bottom of the kickstarter they have a link to Jellop, they run ad campaigns to boost kickstarter projects.<p>This might be the real story, but not sure since there are no metrics on how much they&#x27;ve helped.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jellopcrowdfunding.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jellopcrowdfunding.com&#x2F;</a>

The video is kinda similiar to the Dollar-Shave-Club commercial ;-) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI</a>

My understanding is that best-practice now is to use SVG instead of icon fonts.

You killed VideoPixie. Bad time to be down.

Can someone pls explain the difference between personal and student licenses? They&#x27;re both $20.

FontAwesome is amazing, so useful

Just got a email from the A5 campaign asking for help to get over the $1M hump.

Some people think making a font is boring and senseless, but I think it is character building...

How can one wisely use $ 900K to maintain an open source icons rendering in a font format?<p>This seems to me as a total waste of money.<p>Too much money will ruin creativity processes, and so it did in most of the cases I have observed.