Symbols for Sketch

This repo contains a set of templates to make a symbol font (icon font) with Sketch. What to do is ...

0. Setup Tools
1. Draw Icons
2. Gulp!

Just 3 steps! Enjoy making your original fonts ;-)

Requirements

• Mac
• Node.js
• Sketch

Setup Tools

Node.js and gulp.js

You need some command line environments. But don't worry. Almost all will be done through GUI.

Go to http://nodejs.org/ and click the INSTALL link.

Open the file downloaded and install it into your mac.

Download this repo

Download this repo from GitHub. Extract it into the folder you like. e.g. /Users/yourname/Documents/your_icons

Open Terminal.app. You may find it at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app as you know.

Go to the folder in Terminal.app:

$ cd /Users/yourname/Documents/your_icons

Install some tools into the folder:

$ npm install

Sketch and Sketch Tools

You haven't got Sketch yet? Visit their site. It's worth more than its price tag. Sketch bundles CLI tool, too. You can use sketchtool command to extract the data from .sketch files.

Note: from ver 3.5, sketchtool has become an out-of-box feature. You don't have to install it seperately.

Draw Icons

It's time to draw your icons!

• symbol-font-14px.sketch (default)
• symbol-font-16px.sketch

There're two templates. Difference between these are just grid size. The template contains 32 artboards to draw each icon. Of cause you can add more artboards if you need.

Name convention

The name of the artboard is important. It define the name of not only the glyph but also the class of CSS.

• icon_name: The character code will be assign automatically
• uF701-icon_name: You can assign the code manually

Gulp!

After saving your Sketch file, go back to Terminal.app again.

$ npm run symbols

Then check the dist directory. There'll be the font and CSS files generated.

Config

You can change the detail as you like. See the gulpfile.js and modify it.

To change the name or style of your font, it would be enough just changing the part below:

/**
 * Font settings
 */
 const fontName = 'symbols' // set name of your symbol font
 const className = 's' // set class name in your CSS
 const template = 'fontawesome-style' // or 'foundation-style'
 const skethcFileName = 'symbol-font-14px.sketch' // or 'symbol-font-16px.sketch'

Live reloading

Try the command below in Terminal.app. This time you will get the browser open automatically.

$ npm start

Then, keep the browser open and change your icon on symbol-font-*.sketch and save it. Boom! Magic will happen. The output inside the browser will be also changed. It's really really convenient. You must try it out.

CSS Styles

You can choose CSS Style templates, and make your own with lodash template.

(1) like Font Awesome

• respect to: Font Awesome
• template: css/fontawesome-style.css

<span class="s s-your_icon"></span>

(2) like Foundation

• respect to: Foundation Icon Font 3
• template: css/foundation-style.css

<span class="s-your_icon"></span>

Variants

for Android Apps

See variants/android directory.

Behind the scenes

We use gulp and some plugins.

• gulp-sketch: to export SVG files from .sketch files
• gulp-iconfont: to convert them into font files

To live-reload, we're using browser-sync.

Trouble Shooting

Case 1: Icons with circle 'filled' with black

Conditions like below.

• Icons which has an inner symbol with a circle or a box outside
• It seems OK with Chrome/Safari on Mac
• Not OK with Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android
• Not OK with IE on Windows

Solution: Revers Order of paths. See the screenshot below. Then Save and recreate the font.

Case 2: Can't export CSS/HTML

gulp-iconfont has changed their API from v2 (June 2015), so we got to change our recipe a little bit.

• Event name: codepoints to glyphs
• Arguments passed: codepoint is equivalent to glyph.unicode[0].charCodeAt(0)

See more detail.

Case 3: Transformed items appear outside the artboard

Conditions:

• rotated and/or transformed elements appear at wrong coordinates after export

Solution: Pipe gulp-imagemin before the iconfont task, which basically makes use of the SVG Optimizer and collapses multiple transformations.

History

• 2.1.0:
  • Added: live reloading (finally found the solution in browser-sync)
  • Added: npm scripts. Now no need to install gulp globally
  • Changed: compatible with standard.js
• 2.0.0: ES6, WOFF2, and adding variations (for Android app by @weitsai)
• 1.2.0: Catch up versions, simplify the instruction
• 1.1.0: Catch up to gulp-iconfont v2(svgicons2svgfont)