Hot take: hand-coding every icon in my set was a waste, a junior dev told me to just build one base SVG and scale it | Crafting With Code

Noah Wood · 2026-10-27T22:35:04.176802+00:00

I spent about 3 weeks hand-drawing 40 pixel-tuned icons in Figma and exporting each one as its own SVG. A junior dev on my team looked at my files and said "why is every path drawn at a different viewBox size, you're doing 40 jobs instead of one." I pushed back hard at first because I wanted every corner to line up on the pixel grid, but he was right that my approach broke the second a client asked for a 20px version. Now I build everything on a 24px grid with a shared stroke and it takes me a day instead of a month. Curious if anyone here still hand-tunes each icon separately, or if I'm late to this.

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Hot take: hand-coding every icon in my set was a waste, a junior dev told me to just build one base SVG and scale it | Crafting With Code - The Design Community Hub