Nowadays, some designers got used to using traditional icons in raster images for png/gif format and easily relocated on the layout.
For developers the situation is a bit different. First of all, it’s harder to take such icons out of the layout and to form the image sprites in order to optimize the number of pass-through queries to the server. Each image sent to the user browser makes one query to the server. Thus, the more images the more queries are sent to the server, which can result in slower work of the website.
Icon fonts have one more huge advantage - the image does not distort or blur when changing the font size. Icon fonts in part imitate vector graphics features, thus the size change does not result in visual change. It’s worth remembering also about svg format.
See also: 10 Methods to Be a Radical Web-Designer
