10 Best Icon Sets for UI Design (2023 edition)
Icons are more than just pretty pictures. They are powerful tools for UI design that can convey meaning, express personality, and guide users without cluttering the screen.
What are icon sets and why are they important for UI design?
Icon sets are collections of icons that share a common style and theme, like fonts. You can use icons for various purposes, such as social media buttons or navigation menus.
Using icons from the same set helps you create a consistent and harmonious design that achieves its main goal: user navigation.
As a designer, you should always aim for uniformity and consistency. That’s why it’s usually better to use one icon style per project.
Using an icon set can benefit your design workflow in several ways, such as:
- Saving you time by avoiding designing your own icons from scratch.
- Ensuring harmony in your designs by using high-quality icon sets that match each other.
- Providing easy-to-recognize icons that enhance your design’s appeal and intuitiveness.
How to choose the best icon sets
for your design When you are looking for an icon set to use in your design, you should pay attention to some key features that make a good icon set.
- They should offer both solid and line versions
Some designers prefer solid icons, while others like line icons. A good icon set should give you both options so you can decide which one suits your design better.
Solid icons tend to be more recognizable than line icons when they represent concrete objects. Line icons may work better for abstract concepts. As you gain more design experience, you will learn which type of icon fits which situation.
2. They should scale well to a consistent frame
Your icons may appear on different screens and devices, so you need to make sure they can scale well to a consistent frame size. This way, you can ensure usability regardless of how users interact with them (mouse or touch).
Also, the consistent frame size is important because not all icons have the same shape or size. You should place them in a frame that has the same proportion throughout your design to avoid scaling issues.
3. They should have enough but not too many icons
Depending on your design project, you may need a lot of icons or just a few.
Check how many icons are in a set to make sure you have enough to cover your needs. If there are not enough icons, you may have to switch to another set halfway through your design. This can break the consistency and harmony of your design.
However, you also don’t want to use a set that has too many icons. This can lower the quality of the design as the icons may become less coherent or distinctive.
Finding the right balance between quantity and quality can be hard. That’s why it’s good to use sets that are recommended by other designers, like the ones we list below.
10 Best Icon Sets for UI Design in 2023
Dazzle UI Icon Pro is a versatile and extensive collection of icons designed to enhance the visual appeal of interfaces and presentations. The icons are created on a 24x24 pixel grid with a focus on simplicity, consistency, and readability.
With over 6,800 icons available, the library is well-organized into 31 categories, making it easy to find the specific icon you need. The icons come in four different styles — Linear, Solid, Duotone, and Monochrome — providing variation and allowing you to choose the style that best suits your project.
One of the key advantages of Dazzle UI Icon Pro is its compatibility with Figma, a popular design software. The icons are specifically designed for Figma, enabling you to seamlessly use and modify them within the software. The collection is also available in a well-organized component library in Figma, making it even more convenient to integrate the icons into your designs.
The icons in Dazzle UI Icon Pro are meticulously crafted with pixel precision, resulting in sharp and clear visuals on any screen. The 2-pixel stroke and rounded corners contribute to a polished and modern look.
In addition to Figma, the icons can also be used with IconJar, a library management tool. They are optimized for SVG output, ensuring efficient usage and scalability.
Dazzle UI Icon Pro offers lifetime updates, meaning you will receive new icons and improvements without any additional cost. This makes it a valuable investment for designers looking for a growing collection of icons to use in their projects.
Overall, Dazzle UI Icon Pro is a comprehensive and user-friendly icon collection that provides designers with a wide range of icons in multiple styles, organized categories, and compatibility with popular design software.
Central icon system is a comprehensive collection of icons meticulously designed to enhance the efficiency and speed of your product design process. With an extensive library of 764 symbols, each offering 30 unique variations, you now have access to an impressive pool of over 22,900 icons, granting you unparalleled creative possibilities.
Our icons prioritize simplicity and versatility. They can be effortlessly customized to seamlessly integrate with your brand and style preferences, allowing adjustments such as stroke width, border radius, and the option to choose between line or filled versions. Accessing and exploring the various icon variations is made convenient through the Figma property panel. Regardless of your selection, our icons maintain a sharp and polished appearance on every device and screen size, guaranteeing visual consistency.
Every icon variation within the Central Icon System is painstakingly handcrafted in Figma, exclusively tailored for Figma users. This meticulous approach ensures that any modification to an icon’s properties corresponds harmoniously with the overall icon system. By adhering to this rigorous process, we guarantee unwavering consistency and uncompromising quality across the entire icon set.
Designed on a precise 24x24 pixel grid, our icons are built upon an enhanced grid system, ensuring a core foundation of consistency. This meticulous grid-based approach guarantees that each icon remains consistent in both design and presentation, adding an extra layer of reliability to your design projects.
Riddle UI Icon PRO is an extensive library of icons that encompasses a grand total of 2000+ meticulously crafted symbols. This comprehensive collection boasts two distinct styles: ultra-straight-angled and rounded-angled shapes, available in both SOLID and Line variations.
Designed to exude a modern and adaptable aesthetic, the icons within Riddle UI Icon can be effortlessly tailored to suit the requirements of diverse projects. They come in various formats, including Figma files, SVG, PNG, and IconJar, facilitating seamless integration across different design tools and platforms. Furthermore, these icons adhere to a 24x24px grid, featuring a consistent 2px stroke width, ensuring ease of use and effortless integration into your design work.
Riddle UI Icon PRO offers a high-quality assortment of icons, providing designers and developers with an exceptional toolkit for their projects. The collection features meticulous attention to detail, with icons drawn on a pixel-based grid and organized into 17 neatly categorized sections. With well-structured naming conventions and thoughtfully sorted categories, locating specific icons becomes a breeze.
The package includes a Figma file, allowing for direct utilization within the Figma design environment. Additionally, a meticulously organized Iconjar Library is provided, further streamlining the access and management of the icon collection. The SVG output has been optimized to ensure optimal performance and compatibility.
With the Riddle UI Icon PRO, you gain the freedom to use the icons in unlimited projects, accompanied by a commitment to lifetime updates. This ensures that your icon library remains up-to-date, evolving alongside your design needs and industry trends.
4. Untitled UI
Designed specifically for modern UI design, our icons are clean, consistent, and professionally crafted. They deliberately avoid excessive styling, ensuring a neutral aesthetic suitable for any project.
With 4x flexible styles to choose from, you can switch effortlessly between minimal line, modern duocolor or duotone, and solid icon styles. Enjoy the magic of maintaining icon overrides within Figma while seamlessly transitioning between styles.
Featuring a vast collection of 4,600+ icons and continuously expanding, our library equips you with everything you need to design modern and stunning UIs and websites. Bid farewell to the days of creating custom icons from scratch.
Experience the convenience of a neatly organized library. Their icons are arranged alphabetically across 19 categories, ensuring effortless navigation. As an added bonus, we provide an IconJar library with smart tags for quick and efficient searching.
5. Heroicons
Introducing HeroIcons, a beloved icon set favored by the Designership team.
Created by the renowned Tailwind CSS, a name highly esteemed among front-end developers, HeroIcons is a recognizable icon set. If you’re familiar with Shipfaster UI, you might already know that HeroIcons is the preferred choice for their icon set.
HeroIcons seamlessly adapts to both dark and light modes, ensuring optimal visibility and aesthetics. It offers exceptional scalability, allowing the icons to be easily resized without compromising their quality. Moreover, HeroIcons provides the flexibility of solid and line versions, granting you direct access to strokes for further customization.
Feather Icons, created by Cole Bemis, has garnered significant popularity among the Designership Team — and rightfully so. This icon set boasts an impressive collection of visually stunning open-source icons available on the internet today.
Each icon within Feather Icons prioritizes simplicity, readability, and design consistency. Designed to align with a 24x24 grid, these icons are meticulously crafted and easily adjustable, ensuring a polished appearance.
Nevertheless, despite the remarkable designs and attention to detail in the Feather Icons set, there are a few drawbacks worth noting. Firstly, the naming system employed for the icons is not particularly user-friendly, which can pose challenges when searching for a specific icon, especially if the name is forgotten. Additionally, while the solid versions of the social icons are satisfactory, the line versions could benefit from further refinement to surpass their solid counterparts.
7. Iconoir
Iconoir (or Iconoir Icon Library) is ahigh-quality selection of free icons. No premium options or sign-ups. Your new alternative to Noun Project, Flaticon, and all Figma resources. Available in SVG, Font, React, React Native, Flutter, Figma and Framer.
Because there are so many, it’s a great icon library to use for new projects or products. You’ll likely be able to find an icon for whatever your need is.
Phosphor Icon set, a collaborative creation by Helena Zhang and Toby Fried. This set offers a vast collection of icons that are consistently designed, scalable, and visually pleasing.
One of the standout features of this icon set is its incredible ease of use when incorporating them into Figma design projects. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced designer, integrating these icons seamlessly into your Figma workflow is a breeze.
For users of the Figma plugin, it’s important to note that the line versions of the icons have a fixed thickness, which can pose challenges when resizing them. However, there’s a simple workaround to maintain the icon’s proportions while resizing: just press ‘K’ to preserve the ratio. Alternatively, you can employ the Skale plugin, which provides a convenient solution to this issue.
9. Google Material Icons
This is an icon library of 7,687 icons and graphics, perfect for user interface and experience design. It’s designed and maintained by Google, so the icons are naturally well-designed for all sorts of needs and use-cases.
Material Icons are available in five styles and a range of downloadable sizes and densities. The icons are based on the core Material Design principles and metrics.
10. Streamline
Introducing Streamline, an expansive icon set and resource comprising nearly 100,000 icons and illustrations, with new additions constantly being made.
Renowned as the preferred icon set in wireframe kits like Wireframy, these icons exhibit remarkable consistency and adaptability to match branding colors seamlessly. Streamline offers the added convenience of a dedicated Streamline app, enabling designers to work on their projects even while on the go.
Moreover, the Streamline team has recently resolved a bug in Figma that affected PNG insertion into artboards and colorization, which caused certain illustrations to inexplicably change to a peculiar dark color. With this fix in place, designers can now confidently utilize Streamline’s illustrations within Figma without encountering such issues.
Learn How to Utilise Icon Sets in Figma & UI Design
As a designer, the tools and resources you utilize have a profound impact on the quality of your designs. By equipping yourself with top-notch design resources like icon sets, you empower yourself to create more consistent, efficient, and exceptional designs.
Additionally, expanding your skill set through educational opportunities such as the Ultimate Figma Masterclass can further elevate your abilities. Immersing yourself in the vibrant Figma and Designership YouTube communities also offers valuable insights, enabling you to learn from experienced designers and discover valuable tips and tricks that can enhance your workflow and refine your creative vision.
Remember, the more time you invest in the design realm, the greater your chances of uncovering invaluable techniques that can accelerate your design process and foster your artistic intuition. Embrace these resources and communities to unlock your full potential as a designer.
