Icon System Design: Build Once, Use Everywhere

Treat icons as reusable building blocks, not one-off graphics. A systematic setup in Figma—defining size, color, and resizing rules upfront—ensures consistency and speeds up your design process. This is foundational for any scalable design system, allowing you to build complex components from tiny, language-independent symbols. The footgun is creating custom icons when a library would suffice, or failing to standardize sizing and constraints, which leads to tedious manual overrides and visual debt.