Podcast 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 thinking Creative process and collaborative design Work-life balance in tech Remote team culture and async collaboration Internet history, meme archaeology, and other nerd ephemera 🧠 Come for the design wisdom, stay for the deep meme cuts and beautifully crafted icons.
Episodes
Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome — and Zach Leatherman is here to explain what that actually means.
In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt has a chat with Zach about the Build Awesome Kickstarter, why this rebrand is part of building a sustainable future for the open source project, and what changes (and what doesn’t) for people already running Eleventy sites.
You’ll hear Zach break down the backwards compatibility promise, the E...
In this episode, Matt and Jory sit down with UK-based icon designer + illustrator Vic Bell to talk about the brand-new Font Awesome icon pack, Graphite — a loose, hand-drawn set that brings texture, depth, and a whole lot of human personality to iconography.
If you’ve ever tried to balance clarity vs. creativity, or wondered how icons can feel more like typefaces with different “voices”, this one’s for you. 🎧
🗒️ What We Cover in Th...
Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites.
TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works.
In this episode, we sit down with Zach Leatherman, creator of Eleventy (11ty), to talk honestly about what happens after open source succeeds. From nap-time coding and nights-and-weekends maintenance to venture capi...
Happy New Year from the Awesomeverse! In this episode, Matt and Jory kick off 2026 by recapping all the wild, weird, and wonderful things that happened across Font Awesome and Web Awesome in 2025. From the launch of FA7 and small-batch icon packs to a possum puppet mascot (yes, really), they reflect on the big (and small batch) wins, behind-the-scenes hilarity, and creative experiments that made the year unforgettable. Oh, and if y...
What is nerdery, really? 🤓 In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we dig into the heart of Font Awesome’s culture — inclusive nerdery. It's not about lone geniuses or command line gatekeepers. It’s about heart, curiosity, humility, and building awesome things with other people. 💛
👾 You'll hear from FA team members Dave and Travis, plus a few snippets from topics we've covered on our blog and internal convos,...
🎬 What do Star Wars, oil painting, and storytelling have in common?
Turns out: everything. In this curiosity-fueled episode, filmmaker and multi-hyphenate creative Andy Maier (Soon Agency) joins host Matt Johnson to talk about building a life powered by relentless learning, visual storytelling, and the kind of curiosity that launches careers 🚀.
From working with Apple, SpaceX, and Microsoft to touring in his me...
Episode Summary
What does it really take to ship something as powerful, polished, and downright magical as Web Awesome? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Lindsay and Cory, the dynamic duo behind the official launch of Web Awesome. Together, they peel back the curtain on how the team brought a customizable design system to life (without summoning any cursed CSS incantations).
From the slick Th...
Episode Summary:
We're heading back to the basement — (sort of). In this episode, Matt catches up with Mike Wilkerson, the OG guest of Podcast Awesome, to unveil the biggest update yet to the official Font Awesome WordPress plugin. From block editor visual support to full-on SVG injection wizardry (yes, that’s a thing), this version is all about giving developers and designers more power, more precision, and fewer plugin confli...
🧠 What do LEGO logos, hand-puppet dreams, citrus gadgets, and naming things "Turbo" have in common? They're all part of Dan Cederholm’s design universe — and part of this wide-ranging, joy-filled second half of our conversation.
In this episode, Dan returns to talk about:
• Embracing constraints as a creative fuel source
• Naming fonts after misspelled words (because ... domains)
• The delightf...
Summary
Designer, author, and co-founder of Dribbble, Dan Cederholm joins Podcast Awesome to chat with Matt Johnson and Jory Raphael about finding joy in creativity later in life, making fonts just for fun, and the art of embracing imperfection. From typefaces and merch to dice games and design detours, Dan shares how side projects, constraints, and a healthy dose of curiosity keep the creative spark alive.
This two-part conversation...
Build once, run everywhere.
In this full-nerd, front-end-leaning episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Zach Leatherman (creator of Eleventy) and Konnor Rogers (Web Awesome developer) to chat about how a static site generator just might be the key to building some of the most powerful, performant documentation on the web.
We dig deep into Eleventy’s evolution, Web Awesome’s hybrid architecture, and how a team of devs f...
Inside the UX lessons, internet lore, and surprising comeback of Clippy
Love him or loathe him, you remember him. Clippy — the googly-eyed paperclip that lived inside Microsoft Word — has become a permanent fixture in internet culture. But how did a productivity tool become the patron saint of annoying-yet-adorable UI? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we’re digging into the cult of Clippy with behind-the-scenes insights from Clip...
Have you ever rage-coded your way into building a developer tool that actually fixes things? Burton Smith has. And we’re here for it.
In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt and Web Awesome's boss, Cory Laviska chat with Burton Smith. Burton is an open source wizard and creator of the Web Components Toolkit, and he tells us about the gap between the promise of Web Components and the messy reality devs often face.
💻 Burton’s to...
🔴 “Excuse me … I believe you have my stapler?”
One line. Infinite memes. A red-hot icon.
In this episode of The Story Behind the Icon, we dive deep into the surprisingly rich lore behind the humble office stapler — and how a cult classic film, a soft-spoken cubicle dweller, and a spray-painted prop turned it into a cultural artifact.
🎧 Whether you’ve got 37 pieces of flair or just enough sarcasm to survive corporate life, this one’s...
Designing Joy: Don Clark of Invisible Creature on Creativity, Collectibles & Culture
In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt hangs out with legendary designer Don Clark of Invisible Creature to dive into the analog soul of digital design. From their punk rock roots and Grammy-nominated album covers to art directing for Seattle’s swankiest restaurant, Don and his brother Ryan have created work you’ve seen —whether you know it or...
💥 A Podcast Awesome Deep Cut
Episode Description:
🛎️ Guess what? We got a fever … and the only prescription is … well, you know. In this very special episode of Podcast Awesome, we hit pause on our usual tech-and-icon-nerdery to unleash a full-throttle ode to one of the wackiest icons in our set: Cowbell Circle Plus.
What starts as a nod to the legendary SNL sketch featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken (The Bruce Dickinson, ...
Pork chop sandwiches!! 🫡 🏃♂️➡️
Gather round the interwebs young Gen Xers and Elder Millennials ...
In this oddball solo episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt rewinds to the early 2000s and dives deep into the glitchy, glorious chaos of Fensler Film’s GI Joe PSA remixes — a series of bootleg web videos that helped shape meme culture as we know it.
These gloriously low-res VHS-rip remixes mashed up 1980s GI Joe cartoon PSAs with absurdi...
Where did the “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” meme come from — and why did it break the early internet?
In this nostalgic deep dive, Matt explores the wackadoodle origin of one of the internet’s most gloriously awkward memes. Before “going viral” was even a phrase, this phrase from the 1992 Sega Genesis game Zero Wing somehow made its way from mistranslation to mass internet hysteria — with techno remixes, Flash videos, Photoshoppe...
“Layouts are sexy but, you know, words still matter.”
In this solo rant-style episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt takes a silly, unhinged dive into the world of Lorem Ipsum — the gibberish placeholder text that’s haunted designers and writers alike since the 1500s. From Cicero’s scrambled Latin to zombie-themed mockups, we trace the wild history and the weird world of filler text.
So ... why do we still treat real content as an af...
Design meets activism. Philosophy meets iconography. Wheelchairs meet graffiti.
In this philosophy-packed episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt chats with professor, artist, and co-founder of the Accessible Icon Project, Brian Glenny. Together with colleague Sara Hendron, they took a bold journey to make a tweak to the accessibility symbol — which led to a humble street art sticker to statewide legislation.
Brian’s story unpacks how a whe...
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