AddThisFeature

Icon Stroke Normalization

Make icons gathered from different sources look as though one hand drew them.

moderate Design Systems

What it adds

A normalization pass over the app's icon artwork unifying stroke weight, terminals, corner treatment, and visual density.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Lay the whole icon set out at one size on one background and identify the outliers: strokes that are heavier or lighter than the rest, corners that are sharp among rounded ones, glyphs that carry twice as much detail as their neighbours.

  2. 2

    Agree one stroke weight, one terminal shape, and one corner radius for the set, and rework the outliers to match rather than adjusting the majority to accommodate them.

  3. 3

    Make stroke weight hold its apparent thickness across the size ladder. An icon scaled down without adjustment reads thin and faint at the smallest step, which is where most icons in an interface actually live.

  4. 4

    Do not normalize the silhouette along with the stroke. An icon that has lost its distinguishing shape is consistent and useless, and users navigate by outline before they see detail.

  5. 5

    The size ladder, naming, alignment, and accessibility rules belong to Icon System; this entry changes only the artwork. Apply it after the set has been consolidated, or the work is done twice.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Brand marks, third-party logos, and deliberately filled icons must be left alone. Redrawing a logo to match an internal stroke weight is a trademark problem as well as a recognition problem.
  • An icon that reads clearly at the largest step can collapse into a smudge at the smallest, where detail merges and gaps close. Test every icon at the smallest size it is actually used at, not at the size it was designed at.
  • Active and inactive variants — a filled and an outlined bookmark, a solid and hollow star — must stay recognisably the same icon. Different silhouettes for the two states make the toggle read as two different controls.
  • Some icons genuinely need to break the rule to stay legible. Record each exception and the reason, so the next person does not normalize it back and undo the fix.
  • Icons sourced later will drift from the set again. Define what a new icon has to satisfy before it is added, and check it at review time rather than discovering the mismatch in production.
  • Pixel alignment matters at small sizes: a half-pixel stroke offset renders blurry on standard-density displays even when the geometry is correct.
  • Normalization must not change an icon's optical weight relative to adjacent text, or the icon will either dominate or disappear beside its label.

Definition of done

9
  • The icon set renders at a single stroke weight with consistent terminals and corner treatment.
  • Apparent stroke thickness holds across every step of the size ladder.
  • Every icon remains identifiable by silhouette after normalization.
  • Brand marks and intentionally filled icons are excluded and documented as such.
  • Paired active and inactive variants read as the same icon in two states.
  • Documented exceptions exist for every icon that deviates, with the reason recorded.
  • Each icon has been checked at the smallest size it is used at in the app.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.