Icons

You can reinforce a message with an icon: where a picture is worth a thousand words, to make something stand out or to your support text. Think of a phone for a phone number, the LinkedIn logo as part of a web page or check marks and crosses in a list of lines. Use the icons from the Awesome font for this.  

Font Awesome

There are a few thousand icons available in Awesome, divided into different categories such as Accessibility and Weather. The VU Designstudio and IT use Awesome. If you don’t have the font, you can often download the icons as images. The colour and style of these icons can be customised for you by the VU Designstudio.  

Contact the VU Designstudio if you want advice or if you cannot find a suitable Awesome icon.

Style Awesome icons

Use the light version of the font Awesome icons.

Put icons in the same colour as the text part they belong to. You can read more about the use of colour within the VU house style here.

Social media icons can be found in the Brands category, in Awesome Solid.

Icons Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainability is one of VU Amsterdam’s spearheads. If you want to visually show that a project or research falls within a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), place the relevant icon. Download the SDG icons from this page.

White SDG icons on a coloured frame

Coloured SDG icons on a white frame

Example​

Click on the image to enlarge. 

Dos & don'ts

Use icons to support the text. Do not use icons as a profiling image like, for example, in the hero image on the website: always use a photo for this. More about using images online (in Dutch).

Photo as hero image for email or website.

Do not use the icons as header image or illustration on a cover.