Use Font Awesome Shapes In Pixelmator

If you’re like me, Font Awesome somehow gets included in all of your projects. The graphics are crisp, and look great in all your artwork and applications. My go-to graphic editor is Pixelmator for Mac, and it lets you use Font Awesome with very little effort.

The following will show you how to add re-usable Font Awesome shapes to Pixelmator for use in any project.

After downloading Font Awesome, you’re going to want to double click on the true type font (TTF) file and install it into your Mac’s Font Book. This will let us use the glyph icons in any Mac application, including Pixelmator.

Open Pixelmator and choose the text tool. This is where things might get a little challenging. Navigate to the Font Awesome Cheatsheet, to view a list of copy-paste icons. Copy any of the icons and paste them into the text box created with the text tool. This should automatically switch the font to Font Awesome and give you a copy of the icon that you pasted.

This is good and all, but it is still a font and it isn’t easily re-usable. Our goal is to save a set of icons to the shape tool so we can quickly access them as necessary. In your explorer, right click on the text you just added that includes the Font Awesome icon. You should have an option to convert to shape in the context menu. After converting to shape, click on the shape tool and add a shape by clicking the settings gear. This will permanently add the currently selected shape to the list.

Since I am an app developer, I’ve added the Android, iOS, and social media icons to my shape list since I happen to use them quite frequently.

A video version of this article can be seen below.

Nic Raboy

Nic Raboy is an advocate of modern web and mobile development technologies. He has experience in C#, JavaScript, Golang and a variety of frameworks such as Angular, NativeScript, and Unity. Nic writes about his development experiences related to making web and mobile development easier to understand.