Symbolic tag names

Try using unicode names for your tags in rc.lua:

tags = {
    -- names = { "☠", "⌥", "✇", "⌤", "⍜", "✣", "⌨", "⌘", "☕" },
    names = { "☭", "⌥", "✇", "⌤", "☼", "⌘" },
    layout = { layouts[2], layouts[2], layouts[2], layouts[2], layouts[2] , layouts[2] }
}

Another Way

The above didn't work for me in Awesome 3.4.9. This did:

-- {{{ Tags
-- Define a tag table which hold all screen tags.
tags = {}

for s = 1, screen.count() do
    -- Each screen has its own tag table.
    tags[s] = awful.tag({ "♨", "⌨", "⚡", "✉", "☕", "❁", "☃", "☄", "⚢" }, s, layouts[1])
--  tags[s] = awful.tag({ "➊", "➋", "➌", "➍", "➎", "➏", "➐", "➑", "➒"  }, s, layouts[1]) -- these are boring but I like them.  
end

Also, I found the images I'd chosen to be hard to see with my current font settings. So I edited theme.lua as well to make the taglist bigger:

-- this is my default font
theme.font      = "Inconsolata Medium 10"
-- make tag list bigger
theme.taglist_font = "Inconsolata Medium 14"