Iconography

The arrow

<!-- Canonical markup -->
<svg width="14" height="14" viewBox="0 0 16 16" fill="none">
  <path d="M4 12L12 4M12 4H5M12 4V11"
        stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="1.5"
        stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"/>
</svg>

Hover behavior

On hover, the arrow shifts up and to the right: transform: translate(2px, -2px). The transition is 200ms ease. Paired with a quiet underlined action, the border darkens as the arrow moves.

The icon library — Lucide

Lucide is the icon library. ~1,400 outline icons, consistent 24×24 grid, stroke-customizable. It’s shadcn’s default, so every Button, Dialog, and Select primitive already uses it.

Preview

Every icon renders in currentColor, so it inherits whatever text color surrounds it. Toggle through the brand palette, semantic colors, stroke weight, and size to see every variant:

Coloring rules

• Default: currentColor. Icons inherit the surrounding text color — usually --text-muted for inactive states, --foreground for primary contexts.
• Active / emphasized: --accent (graphite). For selected sidebar items, active toggles, and primary controls.
• Disabled / tertiary: --text-faint.
• Never tint a decorative icon in --destructive, --success, or --warning. Those colors are for status badges, not icons-as-decoration.

Sizing

• 14px — inline with body text, inside small buttons
• 16px — most common; toolbars, row actions, sidebar nav
• 18–20px — featured list items, section headers
• 22–24px — empty states, hero cards, large affordances

Stroke weight: 1.5 for web UI. Keep the outline clear and restrained.

Install

Shadcn projects already have it. For React without shadcn:

npm install lucide-react

Usage:

import { Search, Settings } from 'lucide-react'

<Search className="h-4 w-4" strokeWidth={1.5} />

Animated icons — Lucide Animated

Lucide Animated ships every Lucide icon with a tasteful hover or click animation, built on Motion. Same icon vocabulary, same stroke style — just alive when you need them to be. Use sparingly: marketing pages, empty states, micro-rewards. Never on dense toolbars.

Preview

Hover any icon to play its animation. The recreations below use CSS to demonstrate the visual style — production usage installs the React components. The color and stroke toggles above apply here too.

Install

Each icon is its own component. Add one through the shadcn CLI:

pnpm dlx shadcn@latest add @lucide-animated/heart

Browse the full set at lucide-animated.com.

Usage:

import { Heart } from '@/components/ui/heart'

<Heart className="text-foreground" />

When to reach for it

• Yes: primary CTA confirmations (heart on save, sparkles on AI), empty-state nudges, hero affordances on the homepage.
• No: dense toolbars, table row actions, sidebar navigation. Motion in those contexts becomes noise.
• Never both: on any single surface, pick animated or static — mixing makes the static icons feel broken.

What to avoid

Even with Lucide, a few rules stay non-negotiable:

• ×Unicode arrows (→ ↗ ➜) — use Lucide’s arrow-up-right
• ×Mixing icon libraries (no Heroicons, no Phosphor)
• ×Emoji (🚀 ✨ 👉) in UI chrome
• ×Filled / solid variants as default (outline only)
• ×Multi-color icons (always single stroke color)
• ×Stroke weights other than 1.5

If a surface seems to need more iconography, it usually needs better typography and spacing instead.

In use

Three common placements: