Creating icon fonts doesn't have to be time-consuming, because there are several generators that let you build your own custom font — using only the icons you really need — to help reduce file size. These also provide a download package with font and CSS files, ready to integrate straight into your website.

Using an icon font can improve load times by up to 14%, and because they're vector in nature, they're infinitely scalable, while still being smaller in size than an image sprite. You can style icon fonts dynamically using CSS, rather than requiring a new graphic, with the added bonus of using CSS3 properties such as "text-shadow."

The process for using icon fonts is the same as loading any other font — by using the "@font-face" method, you can create the CSS rules that apply to each icon, create specific icon classes and finally add some simple HTML markup. Or, you can take an alternate approach and use the "data-icon" attribute in combination with CSS attribute selectors.

We've rounded up eight of the best icon font generators to help you start using scalable, lightweight, resolution-independent fonts in your own projects.