Interviewer: Matt:
Welcome to Podcast Awesome. On this series of Nerd Show and Tell episodes, we chat with members of a fun, awesome team, take a deep dive into some of their recent work, and share the nerdy interest that enrich their lives.

Speaker 2:
(Singing).

Interviewer: Matt:
I'm your host Matt Johnson. Today we're talking with Icon Designer Noah Jacobus. At Font Awesome, we take pride in working with the very best people we know, not only those with top tier professional skills, but the kind of quality people you want to work with every day. That's why we were so thrilled when Noah joined the Font Awesome team.

Speaker 2:
(Singing).

Interviewer: Matt:
Noah tells us about the monumental task of creating the upcoming font. Awesome sharp icon family and shares his love of minimal retro styled games.
Thanks for hanging out today in our nerd show and tell. I'm really curious, how did you get into the world of making icons and what's your professional background?

Noah Jacobus:
Yeah. I first became aware of icons as kind of a craft in and of itself, probably back in middle school or so. I definitely didn't think there was any kind of career that could be associated with it. It seemed like more of an interesting kind of side art project or anything else. Probably because they first came to my attention through the work of the Icon Factory who back when I was a middle schooler, at least, when I first became aware of them, used to run a contest called Pixelpalooza every year where people could enter icons that were for Mac OS at the time system replacement type stuff. And I squeaked by with what little skill I had at the time and the software I had to try to reach these levels of quality that I was seeing. And it kind of helped start teaching my eye a little bit about things that make good eye concepts, especially consistency and being creative within those immense constraints.

And so I started making some of that stuff just for fun at the time, but I didn't think that there was any kind of professional outlet kind of associated with that. So graphic design kind of sat on the back burner for a while, even though that was always kind of my favorite part of school projects, like writing papers and stuff was always doing the type setting or what little bit of that you could do in Microsoft Word at the time and picking fonts and all that kind of stuff and making little graphics for papers and things.
And so that just was kind of a blip in my career, because I went to school for music history, which was kind of a big thing that was a big deal in my family, music education. Both my mom and my dad studied it, my brother studied it, others in our family did, too. And so I kind of followed in the family business, so to speak, and went to school for that.

Interviewer: Matt:
We've got some commonality there. My dad's a music teacher as well.

Noah Jacobus:
Excellent.

Interviewer: Matt:
Yeah. And so is my aunt and very, very musical family. That's cool.

Noah Jacobus:
I think there's definitely connection between music and the visual arts and the verbal arts. I think there's a lot of brain crossover there.

Interviewer: Matt:
Yeah. Tell me about that. What do you mean?

Noah Jacobus:
Well, it's actually a lot of the things that you look for, because a large part of at least learning to play music in a more traditional sense in a concert band or an orchestra or something like that, and learning to the analyzation and interpretation of material has a big crossover I think, into visual arts especially. And there's even a lot of shared terminology between say, music and visual design, especially when we talk about things like visual rhythm and hierarchy, developing a visual rhythm of knowing where to look, those kinds of things. Like when someone is listening to a piece of music and knowing how it should flow a little bit with expected chord progression and expected rhythm, and knowing where beats are going to fall can help put someone at ease in that way. Developing visual rhythms through hierarchy and grid usage and things like that are a big way towards helping guide someone to understanding a piece of visual information in a similar way. So I-

Interviewer: Matt:
That's never really thought of that. That's so interesting. And I'm sure that you're also using the same part of your brain in a sense, too. And I think that what you said with the world of words, there's a sameness to that also, because you have to build upon information and create a flow that makes sense for the person taking it in. Yeah, I can see how there's connections to that.

Interestingly, years ago I was in publishing, and so I would edit books and I was doing a side job with a guy and he was asking me about my background, conversation kind of like this. And I told him I was a musician and he said, "Oh, that's so interesting. Some of the best speech writers are historically musicians too, because they understand cadence and how to build on something that makes sense." And it's so interesting how all those things come together. So you went to school for music education sounds like, and so now you're an icon designer. Can you tell me a little bit about from music education to where you're at now?

Noah Jacobus:
Well, it really came down to reaching the end of my senior year. And the options were, because I was specifically focusing on music history, and so the two paths ahead of me were either continuing in education of music history, so going on to masters and doctoral work or to start essentially... Well, they're more intertwined than that, but also to start writing books about music history essentially. So it's trying to get published or start continue down into teaching music history eventually. And those were the only paths. And I was like, well, I don't really think I want to be in traditional education and I don't really fancy writing dry music textbooks for the rest of my life, which seemed to be the only things ahead of me. And all during this time in college, I had continued to dabble a little bit in design, because as many of us did, I got a bootleg copy of Photoshop from my roommate, and I started making dumb joke t-shirts and stuff for friends, and eventually got into doing some actual design work for the music department for recitals and events, and did a lot of design work for my own. I wasn't a thesis per se, but my big senior presentation in music history, that kind of capped the whole thing.

And so that was still kind of an undercurrent of my time and effort. And then my very last semester, I was able to get into a first level graphic design class because I was a senior, I had priorities. So I don't know what poor soul I bumped out of there, who could have used that slot. So I ended up taking my first class I'd ever had in graphic design, learning more about the actual craft and profession of it and things you could do with it to make money in a career. That kind of took off for me. And so that's kind of where everything diverted, which was an interesting conversation with both friends and family to be like, well, I'm not using this degree.

Interviewer: Matt:
Yeah. Well, that's so common these days too. Lots of twists and turns and you find yourself in a different field. But it's so interesting what you were saying earlier about other creative forms and how there's just such a similarity between those things and that informed your own work as a designer. How do you see how those worlds maybe came together for you? The skills that you learned as a musician and how you were able to bring some of those skills to design, for example?

Noah Jacobus:
Yeah. Well, a great example that brings to mind immediately is research and presentation was a huge thing, especially in studying music history. 80 to 90% of that is just research. You're just gathering sources and synthesizing information and recombining and trying to make it interesting to a layman in terms of a lot of these more dry subjects. So learning how to research well has yielded a ton of benefit for me in design, especially. Interestingly, a lot of the studying more world music and ethnomusicology specifically in what sorts of aspects of music were important to different cultures at different times throughout history and taking some kernels of those, of that stuff to look for into, even now with icon design of looking at semiotics and symbology across cultures and trying to determine what sorts of things make sense and read a certain way in certain parts of the world versus others and what's going to make sense and things to avoid and all that kind of stuff. There have been some interesting threads between those specifically.
So yeah, definitely not a waste that I studied all those things, but it's just been interesting to see a lot of those reused in other ways. And even the two things I didn't think I wanted to do, teach and write, I have ended up doing in different ways that I didn't expect, because I've done a lot of design and icon education, just not formal classroom.

Interviewer: Matt:
Right. Yep. Oh, that's really cool to see how those things all come together.
So at Font Awesome, we work in these six week splits. And is there anything recently, maybe the last few splits that you've worked on that you'd want to tell us about?

Noah Jacobus:
Sure. It's largely the same, just because one of the big things that got me on board initially was this push to get Sharp released, which as of now at least we have got Sharp Solid out in the world and a lot of people are loving, it seems like, which is fantastic. So most of the splits, actually every single split since I began, has been working on Sharp in some capacity. There's been some other fun stuff mixed in some of the things, you know, and I got to work on a lot of the marketing stuff around the release of Sharp and promoting all of that, which was a lot of fun, making some fun imagery, showing off a lot of these new icons and new things you can do with them. But yeah, it's been mostly Sharp, which has been very rewarding to see creep ever closer to completion.

Interviewer: Matt:
A few weeks ago, I think I mentioned we were chatting about what we were working on, and I thought, golly, thousands and thousands of icons, and isn't that getting a little bit laborious? And you were sort of gleeful about it in a sense. Well, I'm doing exactly what I want to do all the time.

Noah Jacobus:
Yeah, that's true. It's hard to get frustrated with it when it is like, yeah, it's a weird labor of love because it's like I love icons so much, which to a lot of people sounds weird, but it's right in my wheelhouse of a very niche thing I really enjoy doing and a lot of other people. So that works out.
Yeah, I've really enjoyed, even though it has been thousands and thousands of icons at this point, that kind of scratches an itch that never used to get scratched at previous jobs, especially my last one, which was working at an agency. So it was a lot of quick turnarounds, a different client every two or three weeks. And so, you got to do a lot of really amazing work and it was fun and there was a lot of different business verticals and different kinds of things you were working with, but it never felt like you really got to work on something to completion, kind of scramble to the finish line and make a nice product or a nice set of icons or whatever the thing needed. And then it felt throwing it over the fence and well, I hope you can use this buy and then moving on to the next project and it might never get used. It might not get used or implemented correctly or as intended or who knows what could happen to that work. So here at Font Awesome to finally be able to sit down and be like, yes, for eight months I'm going to make these the best damn Sharp icons they can possibly be and I can continue to iterate on. It has been great.

Interviewer: Matt:
That's great. I am curious about maybe some of the icons that don't really lend themselves to Sharpness. Can you say? A circle is not sharp.

Noah Jacobus:
Yeah.

Interviewer: Matt:
Or do you really want your toilet paper to be Sharp? So are there some things and challenges that came up with this particular project that you had to step back and think through?

Noah Jacobus:
Yeah, that was an interesting thing, because a little bit of the sharp work had started before I came on with Jory and some contract folks had started to test the waters a little bit to see what a Sharp style would look like. So that was a decent exploratory phase at the beginning when I came on, too. Basically taking a whole batch of icons and running them through a gauntlet of what do we want the new rules to be, because we want them to still make sense as Font Awesome icons and still be generally using the same dimensions and proportions and stuff like that. But Font Awesome 6 was already pretty rounded and friendly, and so it was kind of like, how can we manage that? And yeah, exactly. To your point there, we have a lot of circular stuff and even just plain circle icons and it's just like there's nothing to be done about that really when it comes to sharpening and you have to walk that line of clarity versus cleverness of this, we could make these all super angular and super sharp and then they make absolutely no sense. You cannot understand what this icon is supposed to mean, or it no longer bears any resemblance to Font Awesome classics.
So kind of hacking away rounded bits and still keeping some level of curves. All of our people icons are a good example of that. People in various poses and doing different things, because we wanted to, especially with more organic stuff like people or food or things like that, there has to be still some level of curvature to some of these things so that they're still able to read. So if you're looking at all our people icons, we kept all their butts round because that was one thing we identified. These make them seem more like people if we keep some curvature in here. So yeah, there's a lot of weird little things like that where there was some level of compromise, but where we can, we do try to inject little bits of sharpness if possible, if anything lends itself to that.

Interviewer: Matt:
So at Font Awesome there's a real high value put on sharing our nerd, and that's sort of the point of these conversations. And obviously we've already discussed there's all kinds of things that inform your design work. And so I guess I'm curious what kind of stuff are you nerding out about outside of work-related things? Anything design oriented or tech? What have you been into lately?

Noah Jacobus:
Probably the two main things I do outside of work are Dungeons and Dragons and video games. More specifically, I've been really getting interested in a lot of retro gaming. More specifically I guess retro handhelds.

Interviewer: Matt:
Okay.

Noah Jacobus:
More so I've been getting much more interested in the history of retro gaming handhelds, because I wasn't able to have one growing up, but I had a lot of friends who had Game Boys and stuff, and so I kind of leached off of them whenever I could. And the resurgence of interest in that as well as some new stuff, the Playdate by Panic has been really cool to see in development. And I was finally able to get one earlier this year.

And the emphasis that goes into... Especially when you're creating a new handheld, this that's kind of inspired by the Game Boy in a lot of old things and kind of choosing which design constraints you want to embrace to kind of set it apart. Because the Playdate is kind of a weird form factor and it has a black and white screen that doesn't have a backlight, and it's got some very unique inputs on it. It has some of the stuff you might expect with buttons and stuff, but it also has an accelerometer and it has a crank on the side of it. And other things like that that are really interesting of these are some new innovative things, but there's still cool ways to foster creativity because it's not a little wonder handheld that can do everything. It can only do some specific things very well. And so there's some very creative solutions for how to make interesting games for that. And so that's the same kind of thing that interests me a lot about iconography in that way as that emphasis on working within constraints. And I think that's kind of what drew me to retro gaming and the resurrection of it as well. And the preservation of it too is a kind of focus on that, working with what they had and really making cool stuff.

Interviewer: Matt:
Okay. What's your favorite icon or icon category?

Noah Jacobus:
Yes, that's tough because there's so many to choose from, but now that I have looked at all of them for the past eight months, I should have a better idea of what all's in there. Probably either the clarinet icon, because as we were talking about my background of music, that was my instrument of choice from fourth grade through college. So I had a lot of experience with that. I'm also a big fan of the Book Skull icon, mainly because of Army of Darkness, which is my traditional Halloween movie of choice.

Interviewer: Matt:
Nice.

Noah Jacobus:
And which I still weirdly have not seen either of the previous two Evil Dead films, but that's on my to-do list.

Interviewer: Matt:
Is there any icon theme that needs to make it into the Font awesome Canon that you're chomping at the bit to build out?

Noah Jacobus:
Well, I was very surprised when I started that there weren't any dinosaurs within Font Awesome. So if possible, which I know that can be a little tough. We have a really good set of animals and nature related icons, but with the exception of, I mean there's like the whale and the horse might be the biggest animals, but I'm trying to think of other big... If I wanted to make a big old long neck dinosaur trying to wedge that into the space. That's going to be the challenge is determining which ones and how to make them work in the space. So I'd love to add some dinos at some point, but I'm slowly adding in some favorite things. I've already, speaking of the Playdate, I have already added one in, and I think it will be coming out in a release pretty soon as handheld game crank or something like that. So that's sneaking its way in. But after that, when I've got some free time, I want to add some dinosaurs.

Interviewer: Matt:
So we're in the middle of our cool down now. Are you working on anything fun right now?

Noah Jacobus:
I am working on some pretty fun swag and merchandise, which should be really fun. Something, hopefully, that will also be able to go out into the world and not just be for us. We do get to design a lot of fun things just for us, but I'm also excited to see this get out there to the masses. And it's another fun way to also reuse a lot of our icons in new and interesting ways, too. Some Sharp stuff that has not been released yet will be in this.

Interviewer: Matt:
So tell me. It's going to be a branded switchblade to promote Font Awesome Sharp, obviously.

Noah Jacobus:
I don't know if we are prepared for the potential lawsuits.

Interviewer: Matt:
Nice. Thanks for listening in to Podcast Awesome. A special thank you to Noah for coming on the show. If you like what you've heard, please give us a rating and review and share this episode with your nerd friends. This episode was produced and edited by yours truly, Matt Johnson. The Font Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin and Audio Mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions. And now please enjoy a musical composition by our own Noah Jacobus.