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How To Add Icons

You can place Font Awesome icons just about anywhere, and we've tried to make it so that icons will take on the characteristics and blend in with surrounding text naturally.

We’ll cover the basics of how to add icons to your project, shorthand class names for different icon styles, how to add icons to HTML, using icons aliases, and more!

Before You Get Started

Make sure you’ve:

Basics

To add an icon, you need to know a few bits of information:

  1. The shorthand class name for the style you want to use
  2. The icon name, prefixed with fa- (meaning "Font Awesome" naturally!)
  3. The shorthand class name for the family you want to use Optional

Families + Styles

There are three families of Font Awesome icons - each with a unique look, class name, and @font-face font-family. In both Font Awesome Classic and Sharp, there are five styles of Font Awesome icons. Here are some examples:

Classic Family

Style Availability Style class font-weight Looks like
Solid Free Plan fa-solid 900
Regular Pro only fa-regular 400
Light Pro only fa-light 300
Thin Pro only fa-thin 100
Duotone Pro only fa-duotone 900

Sharp Family

Style Availability Style class font-weight Looks like
Solid Pro only fa-sharp fa-solid 900
Regular Pro only fa-sharp fa-regular 400
Light Coming Soon!
Thin Coming Soon!
Duotone Coming Soon!

Brands Family

Style Availability Style class font-weight Looks like
Brands Free Plan fa-brands 400

Kit Custom Icons (from a downloaded Kit)

Style Availability Style class font-weight
Kit Custom Icons Pro only fa-kit 400

Font Awesome Classic is Our Default Family

If you don't specify a family class name, our styling toolkit will render icons in Font Awesome Classic, the original look and feel that's always in style. But if you need to reference the Classic family, you can just add the fa-classic in your icon's HTML class names. If you want to change any or all icons to use Sharp, just add fa-sharp in the same manner!

Add Icons to HTML

We designed Font Awesome for use with inline elements, and we recommend that you stick with a consistent element in your project. We recommend using <i> element with the Font Awesome CSS classes for the style class for the style of icon you want to use and the icon name class with the fa- prefix for the icon you want to use. Accessibility-minded folks may want to opt for the <span> element instead of <i>.

Here's an example:

<!-- This example uses <i> element with: 
1. the `fa-solid` style class for solid style
2. the `user` icon with the `fa-` prefix -->
<i class="fa-solid fa-user"></i>

<!-- Or you can use a <span> element, with classes applied in the same way -->
<span class="fa-solid fa-user"></span>

Setting Different Families + Styles

And here's an example that references different styles and families of icons:

<!-- all styles of icons (in Font Awesome Classic by default) -->
<i class="fa-solid fa-user"></i>
<i class="fa-regular fa-user"></i>
<i class="fa-light fa-user"></i>
<i class="fa-thin fa-user"></i>
<i class="fa-duotone fa-user"></i>

<!-- a Brands icon -->
<i class="fa-brands fa-font-awesome"></i>

<!-- a specifically set Font Awesome Sharp Solid icon -->
<i class="fa-sharp fa-solid fa-user"></i>

<!-- a specifically set Font Awesome Sharp Regular icon -->
<i class="fa-sharp fa-regular fa-user"></i>

Font Awesome Sharp requires Pro and specific versions!

Make sure you have an active Pro-level plan or a Pro license with access to the specific versions that include Sharp's styles.

Stay on target with those CSS rules!

When using our SVG framework, remember that DOM elements with Font Awesome classes are replaced with injected <svg> elements by default. Be sure that your CSS rules target the right element.

Aliases

We've updated many of our icon names in Version 6 to make them more universal and consistent. But we wanted to make sure not to break your existing code, so we made aliases for renamed icons to allow them to work with either the old or new names.

And you can use the old or new name for styles as well. So you can still use fas, far, fal, fad, and fab. And we've also included older prefix versions for our new Thin style (fat) and new Sharp family of styles (Sharp Solid is fass while Sharp Regular is fasr).

<!-- All of these code snippets will render the same Solid icon thanks to aliases. -->
<i class="fa-solid fa-cutlery"></i>
<i class="fa-solid fa-utensils"></i>
<i class="fas fa-utensils"></i>

<!-- All of these code snippets will render the same Sharp Solid icon thanks to aliases. -->
  <i class="fa-sharp fa-solid fa-times"></i>
  <i class="fa-sharp fa-solid fa-close"></i>
  <i class="fass fa-xmark"></i>

Alternate Ways to Add Icons

We also have many other ways to add Font Awesome icons, in case your situation calls for something specific:

When using Web Fonts

When using SVGs