Unlocking Figma's Rainbow Magic: How We Transformed Our Icon Design Process

Podcast Awesome

Why Font Awesome Switched to Figma: Boolean Magic, Sharp Icons & Real-Time Design 🚀

In this fun and vector-loving episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt catches up with icon design duo Noah Jacobus and Jory Raphael to chat all things Figma. They unpack what makes Figma such a killer tool for collaborative design — hello, real-time editing and Boolean wizardry! We also peek into how it compares to Adobe Illustrator, get the scoop on Adobe’s acquisition of Figma, and daydream about a possible Font Awesome plugin in the future. Whether you're a vector nerd or just Fig-curious, there’s plenty to love here.

✨ What We Cover in This Episode

• 🌈 “Figma has rainbow magic.” (For real, it does.)
• 🤝 Real-time collab and why it rocks for icon design
• 🧮 Boolean operations and non-destructive editing, aka vector sorcery
• 🏢 Adobe's acquisition of Figma: friend or foe?
• 🧩 Plugins, problems, and finding fixes with the Figma community
• 💡 How Sharp icons + Figma = the dream team

⏱️ Timestamps

• 00:05:56 Tools don’t always matter (but sometimes they really do)
• 00:12:12 Adobe owns Figma now
• 00:12:31 Adobe acquisitions: the good, the bad, the ugly
• 00:24:22 Linking Font Awesome Pro accounts
• 00:27:09 Figma has rainbow magic 🌈✨

🔗 Links & Resources

• The Font Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin
• Audio mastering by Chris Enns and Lemon Productions
• 10 Reasons We Switched to Figma for Icon Design

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HIGHLIGHTS
"So Figma has rainbow magic." (00:26:57-00:27:19)"Figma is a central place where we can both work in the same file at the same time.
If I make a change, he sees it." (00:20:52-00:23:44)"Noah is entirely responsible for us moving to Figma." (00:00:00-00:03:29)
"And the ability to easily test things in the context of digital products is kind of where it found its place for me." (00:03:23-00:06:24)
"Being able to identify each of those, you know, every element of a stroke shape or path and make adjustments to it that way is pretty cool." (00:17:58-00:20:57)
"Boolean operations are one of the biggest ones... it's kind of a unique way of treating stroked objects like their actual shapes at the same time... that is something that it can't do. So it's a nice more unique feature." (00:15:08-00:18:08)
"I think that Figma is enough of a powerhouse kind of on its own that that's not going to happen with the employees there and the community, especially as such a huge force with a lot of momentum behind it that helps support the product and keeps it moving." (00:11:51-00:15:16)
"There are just tons of things that are out there that if you run into an issue, someone else likely has run into it already and there's probably a plugin that exists to fix it or address it, which is awesome." (00:23:38-00:27:07)
"But what started to become really appealing to me about Figma was, as Noah said, some of the, well, number one, the simplicity of collaboration, which is now super important because we have multiple icon designers at Fawn Awesome, but also some of their unique takes on doing things with vectors." (00:06:17-00:09:04)
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