hey please feel free to add to the list if I'm missing something. I don't want to prematurely judge them, no one benefits from that really -- if you know something I don't, educate me
The biggest difference I see is that one is attempting to provide a full-featured solution and one is just a web font (albeit a really great one!).
The colors thing is...whatever. The thing that gets me excited about a solution like Iconic is that it seems like they're trying to target the web component/polymer cats (whether or not they succeed is just anecdotal from me - check it out for yourself!).
By this what I mean is they've rolled in literal states to many of the glyph collections. I think the login/logout icons are a really nice example of this (https://useiconic.com/icons/account/). Many of the people complaining that there is a reliance on JS I think don't really understand what's happening here. They're pre-packaging baked-in methods (in this case, setState) that you can roll into your login/logout functions. They're even (kind of, sort of), in-lining ARIA states to make these "buttons" (spans, really) readily accessible. Personally I would have taken it a step further and implemented proper ARIA button roles, but hey, it's still new!
The important take away for me is that, while I will never use this, I'm excited that we're starting to see packages that are more than just a collection of icon sets. Web components is still very "I can't wait!" to front-end, and this seems to bring it closer to reality.
Oh yeah, I REALLY liked what I saw when I looked into polymer. It looks like a radical shift in web dev that could actually happen, and would be amazing for reusability, and a whole lot of other things.
Hmnn so from what you said I gather that the items are:
- Trying to solve "I want to convey implicitly held information through images" rather than "I need some icons"
- Colors are cool
So far the list out the added value over fontawesome I can see is:
- Multiple colors