Podcast Awesome | Podcast on Podbay

Podcast Awesome

Font Awesome

On Podcast Awesome we talk to members of the Font Awesome team about icons, design, tech, business, and of course, nerdery. 🎙️ Podcast Awesome is your all-access pass into the creative engine behind Font Awesome — the web’s favorite icon toolkit. Join host Matt Johnson and the Font Awesome crew (and friends) for deep dives into icon design, front-end engineering, software development, healthy business culture, and a whole lot of lovingly-rendered nerdery.From technical explorations of our open-source tooling, chats with web builders, icon designers, and content creators, with the occasional gleeful rants about early internet meme culture, we bring you stories and strategies from the trenches of building modern web software — with a healthy dose of 80s references and tech dad jokes.🎧 Perfect for:Icon design and content-first thinkingCreative process and collaborative designWork-life balance in techRemote team culture and async collaborationInternet history, meme archaeology, and other nerd ephemera🧠 Come for the design wisdom, stay for the deep meme cuts and beautifully crafted icons.

Icon Wizard 2.0: Build Any Icon You Can Imagine

Font Awesome's Icon Wizard just got a serious upgrade, and it's now powerful enough to make genuinely great icons (or, per Mike's own admission, genuinely terrible ones, if that's more your speed). In this episode of Podcast Awesome, host Matt Johnson sits down with Mike, Ed, and Jory (a rare full-team appearance) to talk about the launch of Icon Wizard 2.0. But it's not just a new coat of paint. You can now mix and match icons across styles, layer up to 20 elements at once with full control ...

Aug 25

43 min

Beach Ball of Death: The Ghost of a $10K Failed Computer

You've seen it a thousand times: you're two minutes late for a video conference call, you throw on a shirt with buttons (It's okay that you're still wearing jammie pants. Don't worry, nobody can see), and right when you need your computer most, that colorful spinning ball shows up to ruin your day. It's called a lot of things, but most of us just call it a curse word. Today we trace the beach ball of death back to its actual origin story, which involves a $10,000 computer that flopped commerc...

Aug 11

14 min

The 404 Error Code Has a Secret Origin Story

Picture this serious, sterile scene: scientists in lab coats, pocket protectors, carrying clipboards, and nobody’s making eye contact. Nobody would guess that this backdrop would produce some of the best internet lore. In this episode, we dig into the myth that the 404 error page came from "Room 404" at CERN, track down what a co-creator of the web actually had to say about it, and land on the real, much more boring origin. Along the way we detour into the HTTP status code that was invented a...

Jul 30

18 min

Josh Williams on Icon Design, AI, and Knowing When to Stop [Pt. 2]

What if software had a final season? Josh Williams is back for round two, and this conversation goes places the first one didn't. We get into designing as a generalist instead of a specialist, why some of the best products (RIP Gowalla, RIP Path) might have worked better as limited series instead of forever-apps, and what it actually feels like to use AI tools day to day — not the hot-take version, the real one, where the hardest part isn't the tech, it's knowing when to stop adding features....

Jul 14

26 min

Icon Design, Creative Freedom, and the Return of Visual Personality — with Josh Williams [Part 1]

Josh Williams has been designing icons since before it was a “real” job. These days, Josh is one of the most respected icon and identity designers working in the field. He helped shape the Font Awesome and Web Awesome logos, and he just designed Mosaic — a brand-new icon pack for Font Awesome Pro with roots in his long-running Uni Calendar letterpress project and a style that's unlike anything we've shipped before. In Part 1, we talk about where Mosaic came from, what it looks like when a ...

Jun 30

27 min

Laura Bohill: A Dream Project, a Design Crisis, and the Chisel Icon Pack

Episode Summary What happens when you give a world-class icon designer a dream brief with almost no boundaries? A brief existential crisis, and eventually a beautiful type-inspired icon packs for Font Awesome 7. 😅 In this episode, Matt and Jory chat with icon designer Laura Bohill about the making of Chisel — the wonderfully chunky icon pack she designed for Font Awesome 7. They get into the weird magic of creative constraints, why icon design is really just tiny-illustration puzzle solving, ...

Jun 16

52 min

How to Spot Great Leadership in Interviews (and Avoid Bad Managers) | Dave Gandy

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy to unpack what it really means to be a great employee and a great manager — without the “rockstar ninja unicorn” nonsense, micromanaging, or performative perks. Dave reframes the idea of a “lifestyle business” as a badge of honor (not a slight), explains why leadership matters more than the role you’re hired for, and shares practical ways to spot healthy management during interviews — plus what auton...

May 26

48 min

Website Color Theming Made Easy [Look Awesome Demo]

Look Awesome: Solving Color Once and for All Locking in the color palette for your project is one of those things that seems simple until you're actually doing it. Pick the wrong shade and your text is unreadable. Pick the right shade and it only works in Figma, not in your codebase, not in Tailwind, not anywhere that matters. Dave Gandy — Font Awesome founder, Kickstarter legend, self-described Nantucket color enthusiast — has been quietly building a tool to fix this mess. It's called Look A...

May 12

20 min

Build Week: What we Made with AI [Part 2] with Dave + Travis

AI makes it easier to build almost anything. So why does that make the job harder? In this episode, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy and engineer Travis Chase to get past the hype and into the real day-to-day of building with AI. The conversation covers what's actually changing on the team, where AI falls short, and what human skills matter more now than they did before. If you're a designer, developer, or anyone trying to figure out where you fit in a world where your outp...

May 5

25 min

Build Week: What we Made with AI [Part 1] with Dave + Travis

💻 AI side quests, but make it Snuggle. 🤖✨ In this episode, we’re fresh off the Snuggle (our company retreat) and talking about what happens when you give a curious team some time, space… and a bunch of AI tools. Travis and Dave join us to share how experimenting with tools like G-Stack, Spec-Kit, and Claude helped us explore ideas, prototype faster, and take on projects we normally wouldn’t have time for. We get into the practical side of it all—what worked, what didn’t, and where AI actual...

Apr 23

28 min