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An icon font is a font that exclusively contains icon glyphs rather than alphanumeric glyphs. A couple of examples are Material Icons and Material Symbols—both are icon fonts, although Material Symbols is a variable font, allowing for fine-tuning via variable axes.

![A representation of font files, with the weight of the Material Symbols font matching the weight of the type shown on the Google Sans font files.](images/thumbnail.svg)

Using fonts to render icons has multiple benefits:

  • Being vector-based, they’re infinitely scalable, unlike rasterized images.
  • Contained in one file, the file size is considerably smaller than a collection of individual images—even vector-based ones.
  • When used on the web, they can be colored and positioned using just CSS, and browser support is excellent.
  • When using variable icon fonts, they’re customizable in a way that allows them to be more closely matched to any accompanying type.