Thursday, March 16, 2017

Material Icons

Google provides a set of 750 icons designed under "material design guidelines" and these are known as Material Design icons. These icons are simple and they support all modern web browsers. Since these icons are vector based, they are scalable as well. To use these icons, we have to load the font (library) material-icons.

Loading the Font (library)

To load the material-icons library, copy and paste the following line in the <head> section of a webpage.
<head>
   <link href = "https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel = "stylesheet">
</head>

Using the Icon

Google's Material Icons provides a long list of icons. Choose any one of them and add the name of the icon class to any HTML element within the < body > tag. In the following example, we have used the icon named accessibility that belongs to the action category.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
      <link href = "https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel = "stylesheet">
   </head>
 
   <body>
      <i class = "material-icons">accessibility</i>
   </body>
 
</html>
It will produce the following output −

Defining the Size

You can increase or decrease the size of an icon by defining its size in the CSS and using it along with the class name as shown below. In the following example, we have declared the size as 6 em.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
      <link href = "https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel = "stylesheet">
  
      <style>
         i.mysize {font-size: 6em;}
      </style>
  
   </head>
 
   <body>
      <i class = "material-icons mysize">accessibility</i>
   </body>
 
</html>
It will produce the following output −

Defining the Color

You can use the CSS to define the color of an icon. The following example shows how you can change the color of an icon called accessibility.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
      <link href = "https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel = "stylesheet">
  
      <style>
         i.custom {font-size: 6em; color: green;}
      </style>
  
   </head>
 
   <body>
      <i class = "material-icons custom">accessibility</i>
   </body>
 
</html>
It will produce the following output −

List of Categories

Google's Material Icons font provides 519 icons in the following categories −
  • Action Icons
  • Alert Icons
  • AV Icons
  • Communication Icons
  • Content Icons
  • Device Icons
  • Editor Icons
  • File Icons
  • Hardware Icons
  • Image Icons
  • Maps Icons
  • Navigation Icons
  • Notification Icons
  • Social Icons
  • Toggle Icons
To use any of these icons, you have to replace the class name in the programs given in this chapter with the class name of the desired icon. In the coming chapters of this Unit (Material Icons), we have explained category-wise the usage and the respective outputs of various Material Icons.
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