Creating icons

The Arcticons style

When creating icons, there are three key points to test your design to:

• Recognizable: There needs to be a clear link with the app, such as the word mark or logo.

• Minimalistic: Try using as fewer lines as possible, resulting in an easy-to-read icon.

• Elegant: Strive for the best-looking design you can make with the source material that you're working with. This is a bit of a personal preference, but make adjustments when necessary to keep your design clean.

Basic principles

• The size of your document should always be 48×48 px.

• Every line has a stroke thickness of 1 px and the color should always be #ffffff (white).

• Dots are 1,5×1,5 px and have a fill (and no stroke) that should also be white.

• The maximum size of your icon should fit into the template circle icon (43×43 px).

  • Square-like icons should fit into the square template (37×37 px).

  • Rectangular icons should fit into the rectangle templates (31×39 px).

• We have created our own font for Arcticons icons, all letters, numbers and other glyphs have to use it for consistency.

You can find the font as an SVG file inside the template folder.

• All lines should have rounded caps & rounded corners.

• Try to keep icons as simple as possible, unnecessary lines make icons harder to read.

Exporting & making them work

Export your icons as SVG files.

Make sure to remove the reference image before exporting.

We don't accept icons that are rastered (PNG, WebP), are too cluttered or don't follow the basic principles.

Start creating

Vector editing software

Uploading to GitHub.

GitHub guide