Icons are everywhere. These “little miracle workers” (as John Hicks described them) help us reinforce meaning in the interfaces we design and build. Their popularity in web design has never been greater; the conciseness and versatility of pictograms in particular make them a lovely fit for displays large and small.

But icons on the web have had their fair share of challenges. They were time-consuming to prepare for every intended display size and color. When high-resolution displays hit the market, icons looked particularly low-res and blocky compared to the text they often accompanied.

So it’s really no wonder that icon fonts became such a hit. Icons displayed via @font-face were resolution-independent and customizable in all the ways we expected text to be. Sure, delivering icons as a typeface was definitely a hack, but it was also useful, versatile, and maybe even a little fun.

But now we need to stop. It’s time to let icon fonts pass on to Hack Heaven, where they can frolic with table-based layouts, Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners and Scalable Inman Flash Replacements. Here’s why…