Google Fonts now supports open source icons, starting with the Material Design icon set

The writing systems we use today have a long history. Human expression started with drawings on cave walls, some dating to at least 40,000BCE.

More recently, the latin character “A” is believed to have evolved from the Phoenician “Aleph”,  which itself started as an abstracted depiction of an ox head, based on the proto-sinaitic script.

And while today’s letters and characters have evolved from abstracted depictions of things in the real world, we still use abstracted forms to communicate concepts and ideas every day.

This is especially true for user interfaces in digital environments. For example, the × icon has become universally known to stand for closing or removing a part of what users see in their screen. You might have also seen a magnifying glass used as shorthand for “search” on your popular search engine or other website.

Because iconography has become a central part of any design system, Material Design maintains a set of over 2,000 distinct icons, available in five styles. And because typography and iconography are so strongly related, we're now adding Material Icons to Google Fonts at fonts.google.com/icons.

Material Design icons are delightful, beautifully crafted symbols for common actions, available in a variety of styles (filled, outlined, rounded, two-tone and sharp). And they’re available for download, or for use as a web font via our API.

We believe that everyone should have access to quality design resources, so Material Icons are open source and available under the Apache 2.0 license. We’re also planning to add other select open source icon sets to Google Fonts in the future.

To celebrate this milestone, we’ve also created an entirely new icon for Google Fonts itself. We decided to rebrand our monogram "F" symbol and turn it into something new that captures the essence of the products & services that Google Fonts offers.

At first glance, the new logo may be seen as abstract shapes composed with circles and rectangles, but on a closer look, you can spot a number of glyphs and icon shapes blended together. The new visual mark gives us greater design flexibility, as well as inspiration for the overall look and feel of the UI to better reflect our vision for the future of Fonts.

You will see our new logo featured on the site header and other Fonts properties.

Google Fonts will continuously provide new fonts and icons and we hope you are excited about this new change as we are, now available on fonts.google.com