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PODCAST

Podcast Awesome

On Podcast Awesome we talk to members of the Font Awesome team about icons, design, tech, business, and of course, nerdery. 🎙️ Podcast Awesome is your all-access pass into the creative engine behind Font Awesome — the web’s favorite icon toolkit. Join host Matt Johnson and the Font Awesome crew (and friends) for deep dives into icon design, front-end engineering, software development, healthy business culture, and a whole lot of lovingly-rendered nerdery.From technical explorations of our

technology design

All Episodes

19:13

The CDN Experiment That Converted One Person (and...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/09/22

Would you take a shot at something you cared about if your odds of success were 1.4%? Font Awesome founders Dave Gandy and Travis Chase did exactly that when they applied to Y Combinator back in 2014. And in the years since, Font Awesome has racked up plenty of failures right alongside the wins. 'Cos that's just what happens when you're building something awesome. In this episode, we go digging through Font Awesome's own flops (a product name that confused customers, a CDN experiment that con...

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14:02

The Sandwich That Broke UX Rules and Won

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/09/10

Pretty much every website has one, you know, those three little lines, usually tucked in a corner, hiding a whole menu behind them. It's become what's known as the hamburger icon. And if you've ever visited fontawesome.com, you may have noticed ours isn't three lines. It's an actual burger, sesame seed bun and all. On this episode of Podcast Awesome, we trace the icon back to a 1981 Xerox Star screen-space problem, through a 20-year disappearance, a comeback on the first iPhone, and a decade ...

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43:04

Icon Wizard 2.0: Build Any Icon You Can Imagine

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/08/25

Font Awesome's Icon Wizard just got a serious upgrade, and it's now powerful enough to make genuinely great icons (or, per Mike's own admission, genuinely terrible ones, if that's more your speed). In this episode of Podcast Awesome, host Matt Johnson sits down with Mike, Ed, and Jory (a rare full-team appearance) to talk about the launch of Icon Wizard 2.0. But it's not just a new coat of paint. You can now mix and match icons across styles, layer up to 20 elements at once with full control ...

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14:56

Beach Ball of Death: The Ghost of a $10K Failed Computer

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/08/11

You've seen it a thousand times: you're two minutes late for a video conference call, you throw on a shirt with buttons (It's okay that you're still wearing jammie pants. Don't worry, nobody can see), and right when you need your computer most, that colorful spinning ball shows up to ruin your day. It's called a lot of things, but most of us just call it a curse word. Today we trace the beach ball of death back to its actual origin story, which involves a $10,000 computer that flopped commerc...

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18:57

The 404 Error Code Has a Secret Origin Story

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/07/30

Picture this serious, sterile scene: scientists in lab coats, pocket protectors, carrying clipboards, and nobody’s making eye contact. Nobody would guess that this backdrop would produce some of the best internet lore. In this episode, we dig into the myth that the 404 error page came from "Room 404" at CERN, track down what a co-creator of the web actually had to say about it, and land on the real, much more boring origin. Along the way we detour into the HTTP status code that was invented a...

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26:59

Josh Williams on Icon Design, AI, and Knowing When to...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/07/14

What if software had a final season? Josh Williams is back for round two, and this conversation goes places the first one didn't. We get into designing as a generalist instead of a specialist, why some of the best products (RIP Gowalla, RIP Path) might have worked better as limited series instead of forever-apps, and what it actually feels like to use AI tools day to day — not the hot-take version, the real one, where the hardest part isn't the tech, it's knowing when to stop adding features....

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27:00

Icon Design, Creative Freedom, and the Return of...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/06/30

Josh Williams has been designing icons since before it was a “real” job. These days, Josh is one of the most respected icon and identity designers working in the field. He helped shape the Font Awesome and Web Awesome logos, and he just designed Mosaic — a brand-new icon pack for Font Awesome Pro with roots in his long-running Uni Calendar letterpress project and a style that's unlike anything we've shipped before. In Part 1, we talk about where Mosaic came from, what it looks like when a ...

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52:54

A Dream Project, a Design Crisis, and the Chisel Icon...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/06/16

Episode Summary What happens when you give a world-class icon designer a dream brief with almost no boundaries? A brief existential crisis, and eventually a beautiful type-inspired icon packs for Font Awesome 7. 😅 In this episode, Matt and Jory chat with icon designer Laura Bohill about the making of Chisel — the wonderfully chunky icon pack she designed for Font Awesome 7. They get into the weird magic of creative constraints, why icon design is really just tiny-illustration puzzle solving,

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48:51

How to Spot Great Leadership in Interviews (and Avoid...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/05/26

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy to unpack what it really means to be a great employee and a great manager — without the “rockstar ninja unicorn” nonsense, micromanaging, or performative perks. Dave reframes the idea of a “lifestyle business” as a badge of honor (not a slight), explains why leadership matters more than the role you’re hired for, and shares practical ways to spot healthy management during interviews — plus what auton...

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20:37

Website Color Theming Made Easy [Look Awesome Demo]

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/05/12

Look Awesome: Solving Color Once and for All Locking in the color palette for your project is one of those things that seems simple until you're actually doing it. Pick the wrong shade and your text is unreadable. Pick the right shade and it only works in Figma, not in your codebase, not in Tailwind, not anywhere that matters. Dave Gandy — Font Awesome founder, Kickstarter legend, self-described Nantucket color enthusiast — has been quietly building a tool to fix this mess. It's called Look A...

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25:18

Say No More: What AI Actually Changes [Part 2]

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/05/05

AI makes it easier to build almost anything. So why does that make the job harder? In this episode, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy and engineer Travis Chase to get past the hype and into the real day-to-day of building with AI. The conversation covers what's actually changing on the team, where AI falls short, and what human skills matter more now than they did before. If you're a designer, developer, or anyone trying to figure out where you fit in a world where your outp...

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28:04

Build Week: What we Made [Part 1] with Dave + Travis

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/04/23

💻 AI side quests, but make it Snuggle. 🤖✨ In this episode, we’re fresh off the Snuggle (our company retreat) and talking about what happens when you give a curious team some time, space… and a bunch of AI tools. Travis and Dave join us to share how experimenting with tools like G-Stack, Spec-Kit, and Claude helped us explore ideas, prototype faster, and take on projects we normally wouldn’t have time for. We get into the practical side of it all—what worked, what didn’t, and where AI

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31:32

Hiring Is a Two-Way Street — Here’s What Most People...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/04/07

Job interviews aren’t just about proving you’re a fit — they’re about figuring out whether the company deserves you, too. 👀 In this episode, Matt chats with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy about why hiring is a two-way street. They unpack the red flags candidates should watch for, what healthy companies actually look like, and how the interview process can reveal way more than a polished mission statement ever will. Dave shares practical advice for job seekers on asking better questions,

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15:13

New Font Awesome Features: PNG Downloads, Color...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/03/24

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Ed and Francis to talk through three newly shipped Font Awesome features that are small, practical, and just the right amount of fun. They dig into individual PNG downloads, a new global color picker for previewing icons in brand colors, and the wonderfully playful User Blender, which lets you mix and match heads, bodies, and styles to create custom user icons for your kit. Along the way, they unpack the thinking behind each feature, how...

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24:19

Eleventy Is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/03/09

Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome — and Zach Leatherman is here to explain what that actually means. In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt has a chat with Zach about the Build Awesome Kickstarter, why this rebrand is part of building a sustainable future for the open source project, and what changes (and what doesn’t) for people already running Eleventy sites. You’ll hear Zach break down the backwards compatibility promise, the Eleventy v3 → Build Awesome v4 upgrade path, and what Build A...

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56:55

Vic Bell on Designing Graphite: Hand-Drawn Icons for...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/02/19

In this episode, Matt and Jory sit down with UK-based icon designer + illustrator Vic Bell to talk about the brand-new Font Awesome icon pack, Graphite — a loose, hand-drawn set that brings texture, depth, and a whole lot of human personality to iconography. If you’ve ever tried to balance clarity vs. creativity, or wondered how icons can feel more like typefaces with different “voices”, this one’s for you. 🎧 🗒️ What We Cover in This Episode 👋 How Vic and Jory connected ✏️ Designing Font

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29:16

How Eleventy Survived: Funding, Growth, and Open...

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/02/03

Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites. TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works. In this episode, we sit down with Zach Leatherman, creator of Eleventy (11ty), to talk honestly about what happens after open source succeeds. From nap-time coding and nights-and-weekends maintenance to venture capital pressure, burnout risk, and the reality of funding long-lived developer to...

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35:12

2025 Awesomeverse Recap with Matt and Jory

Podcast Awesome ·

2026/01/22

Happy New Year from the Awesomeverse! In this episode, Matt and Jory kick off 2026 by recapping all the wild, weird, and wonderful things that happened across Font Awesome and Web Awesome in 2025. From the launch of FA7 and small-batch icon packs to a possum puppet mascot (yes, really), they reflect on the big (and small batch) wins, behind-the-scenes hilarity, and creative experiments that made the year unforgettable. Oh, and if you're wondering what it's like to direct a hot dog-eating scen...

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14:20

Inclusive Nerdery: The Secret Sauce of Great Teams |...

Podcast Awesome ·

2025/12/09

What is nerdery, really? 🤓 In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we dig into the heart of Font Awesome’s culture — inclusive nerdery. It's not about lone geniuses or command line gatekeepers. It’s about heart, curiosity, humility, and building awesome things with other people. 💛 👾 You'll hear from FA team members Dave and Travis, plus a few snippets from topics we've covered on our blog and internal convos, all woven together to show how we: 🎯 Hire for character over cleverness 🔍 Celebrate

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42:58

Andy Maier on Curiosity, Creativity, and the Force...

Podcast Awesome ·

2025/11/25

🎬 What do Star Wars, oil painting, and storytelling have in common? Turns out: everything. In this curiosity-fueled episode, filmmaker and multi-hyphenate creative Andy Maier (Soon Agency) joins host Matt Johnson to talk about building a life powered by relentless learning, visual storytelling, and the kind of curiosity that launches careers 🚀. From working with Apple, SpaceX, and Microsoft to touring in his metal band Opponent and picking up oil painting during a creative pivot — And...

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91 results

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