How to add icons in Figma

Icon plugins put a searchable icon set inside Figma. You search, click, and the icon lands on the canvas as vector layers you can edit. These are the most used icon plugins in our catalog:

• Icons8 (about 2.2 million users): Icons8's full graphics library, icons included.
• Material Design Icons (about 1.5 million users): the Material Design Icons set.
• Feather Icons (about 1 million users): the Feather set of simple outline icons.
• Material Symbols (about 750,000 users): Google's variable icon font as editable icons.
• Font Awesome Icons (about 750,000 users): the Font Awesome set.
• Iconoir (about 615,000 users): an open source set of 1,188 icons.

Check each icon set's license before you ship a product with it. Open source sets are usually free for commercial work, but the terms vary. If you haven't run a plugin before, see how to install Figma plugins.

If your team keeps its icons in a published Figma library, turn it on once per file. Open the Assets panel (⌥2 / Alt+2), click the Libraries icon, find the icon library and click Add to file. The library must be published and you need at least view access to it. The icons then show up in Assets, and you drag them in like any component. When the library changes, the Libraries icon tooltip reads Review library updates.

Library icons stay linked to the source, so a fix in the library reaches every file that uses it once people accept the update. That's the main reason product teams use libraries rather than plugins.

Copy an icon's SVG from an icon website and paste it into Figma, or drag an .svg file onto the canvas. You can also use Place image (⇧⌘K / Ctrl+Shift+K). Figma imports SVG as vectors, not as a flat image, so every path stays editable. Import large batches a few files at a time: Figma's performance advice says to bring in SVGs in small groups to keep memory use down.

Select the vector layers inside the icon, not just the outer frame, and change the colour in the right sidebar. Filled icons use a fill. Outline icons (Feather, for example) usually draw with a stroke, so change the stroke colour instead. For icons that should follow your theme, bind the fill or stroke to a colour variable. Colour variables apply to fills and strokes, so a dark mode switch recolours every icon at once.

Draw on a fixed square frame (24 × 24 is a common size) with the shape and pen tools. Combine shapes with boolean operations such as Union (⌥⇧U / Alt+Shift+U) and Subtract (⌥⇧S / Alt+Shift+S), outline the strokes, and Flatten (⌥⇧F / Alt+Shift+F) when the shape is final. Then press ⌥⌘K / Ctrl+Alt+K to make the icon a component. Flatten is destructive, so keep an unflattened copy if you might edit it later.

Once your icons are components, you don't redraw a button to change its icon. Select the icon instance and press ⇧I / Shift+I to open quick insert, which also swaps the selected instance, then pick the new icon. The size and position stay the same, which is why a fixed square frame for every icon matters.

Select the icon, add an export setting in the Export section of the right sidebar and choose SVG. SVG exports at 1x and has options for outlining text and simplifying strokes. For app assets, export PNG at 2x or 3x instead. For more on formats, see how to export from Figma.