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
79 episodes
Build Week: What we Made [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 jo...
Hiring Is a Two-Way Street — Here’s What Most People Miss
Job interviews aren’t just about proving you’re a fit — they’re about figuring out whether the company deserves you, too. 👀In this episode, Matt chats with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy about why hiring is a two-way street. They unpac...
New Font Awesome Features: PNG Downloads, Color Picker, and User Blender
In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Ed and Francis to talk through three newly shipped Font Awesome features that are small, practical, and just the right amount of fun. They dig into individual PNG downloads, a new <...
Eleventy Is Rebranding to Build Awesome: What Changes (and What Doesn’t)
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 p...
Vic Bell on Designing Graphite: Hand-Drawn Icons for Font Awesome
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 t...
How Eleventy Survived: Funding, Growth, and Open Source Reality
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 s...
2025 Awesomeverse Recap with Matt and Jory
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 pac...
Inclusive Nerdery: The Secret Sauce of Great Teams | Podcast Awesome
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 aw...
Andy Maier on Curiosity, Creativity, and the Force That Binds It All
🎬 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 buil...
Web Awesome Has Landed: Here’s How to Stop Starting From Scratch
Episode SummaryWhat 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 ...
WordPress Just Got Awesome (Again) – Font Awesome Plugin v5 Deep Dive with Mike Wilkerson
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 WordPres...
Living the Dream: Dan Cederholm's Creative Journey [Part 2] | Podcast Awesome
🧠 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 ...
Living the Dream: Dan Cederholm's Creative Journey (Part 1)
SummaryDesigner, 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 ...
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How We Built Web Awesome with 11ty (and Why It’s So Fast)
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...
Clippy Cult: The Paperclip That Wouldn’t Quit
Inside the UX lessons, internet lore, and surprising comeback of ClippyLove him or loathe him, you remember him. Clippy — the googly-eyed paperclip that lived inside Microsoft Word — has become a permanent fixture in inte...
🎙️ Rage Coding, Headless Web Components, and the Future of DX with Burton Smith
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. Bu...
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🖇️ Podcast Awesome: The Story Behind the Stapler Icon
🔴 “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 cul...
Invisible Creature’s Don Clark on Nostalgia, Iconography, and Staying Human
Designing Joy: Don Clark of Invisible Creature on Creativity, Collectibles & CultureIn this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt hangs out with legendary designer Don Clark of Invisible Creature to dive into the analog soul of dig...
Behind the Icon: Cowbell-Circle-Plus
💥 A Podcast Awesome Deep CutEpisode 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-...
The GI Joe PSAs and the Birth of Internet Weird
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 glit...
Set Us Up the Meme: The Strange Tale of All Your Base
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. Befo...
A Short History of Lorem Ipsum (and a Rant)
“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 th...
From Stickers to State Law: The Accessibility Icon Story
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, Bri...
Nerd Show and Tell: Meet Travis Chase
In this very special episode of The Nerd Show and Tell, we finally cornered the elusive co-founder of Font Awesome — Travis Chase! 🧢✨ From dialing into the web back in the modem days, to co-founding a company that powers millions of we...
🎬 From Script to Sizzle: How We Cooked Up the Font Awesome 7 Promo Video 🎬
SummaryWhat does it take to shoot a high-energy, humor-packed, visually delicious Font Awesome marketing video? A 12-hour day, a diner full of chaos, and a guy in a hot dog suit. In this episode, Matt chats with Jory and Isaac, tw...
