History of Iconify

Iconify started as an experiment in 2016, developed in free time.

Only in 2020 it turned from a side project into a full time project, currently it is a very active and quickly growing project.

Early experiments

In 2016, I was working on customisable themes for forum software and was very unhappy with icon fonts, so I have started experimenting with different methods of using icons in projects.

Icon fonts are ugly, hard to customise, and once you choose an icon font, you are stuck with icons available in it. Using multiple icon fonts is not an option because it massively increases page loading times. I wanted to find a different solution, but there was none available.

Proof of concept

In 2018, after a couple of years of experimenting with icons in free time, I came up with a solution: SVG framework that dynamically loads icon data from API.

Finally, I could offer my users a huge choice of icons, but without downsides of embedding multiple icon fonts. Unlike fonts, it downloaded data only for icons used on page, rendered pixel perfect SVG.

Initially, the project was called SimpleSVG.

In late 2018 I renamed the project to Iconify.

Sketch and Figma plugins

In addition to a solution for embedding icons, I needed a solution for browsing available icons. The whole project was created to offer a huge choice of icons in the forum theme customiser, so an icon finder component was needed, which would allow users to select icons when customising the theme.

When working on a solution for icon finder, I have decided to test it as a plugin for Sketch. Icon finder wasn't good, but integration was very successful.

Then Figma Plus was released, which was a third party plugin system for Figma when Figma did not support plugins. I have immediately ported the Sketch plugin to Figma Plus. Few months later, Figma developers released an official plugin system, and I have ported the Figma Plus plugin to Figma.

Startup

Slowly, work on Iconify took over and I did not have time to work on forum software.

Iconify was not a simple solution, it had multiple parts that required a lot of time to develop, maintain and improve: the SVG framework, maintaining API software and servers, maintaining icon sets and tools for parsing icons, developing icon finder, maintaining plugins for Sketch and Figma.

In 2020, I was invited to AWS Startup Day in Helsinki. At the event I talked to several successful startup owners, learned a lot about startups. It was an amazing experience.

After the AWS Startup event, I have decided to try to turn Iconify into a startup. I have officially registered a company in Estonia. At that time, multiple parts of the project were still in development, and the project was far from being ready.