Icons

Guidance and suggestions for using icons with Material-UI.

A system icon or UI icon, symbolizes a command, file, device, or directory. System icons are also used to represent common actions like trash, print, and save, and are commonly found in app bars, toolbars, buttons, and lists. Google has provided a set of Material icons that follow these guidelines.

Material-UI provides two components to render system icons: SvgIcon for rendering SVG paths, and Icon for rendering font icons.

SVG Icons

The SvgIcon component takes an SVG path element as its child and converts it to a React component that displays the path, and allows the icon to be styled and respond to mouse events. SVG elements should be scaled for a 24x24px viewport.

The resulting icon can be used as is, or included as a child for other Material-UI components that use icons. By default, an Icon will inherit the current text color. Optionally, you can set the icon color using one of the theme color properties: primary, secondary, action, error & disabled.

SVG Material icons

It's interesting to have the building blocks needed to implement custom icons, but what about presets? We provide a separate npm package, @material-ui/icons, that includes the 1,000+ official Material icons converted to SvgIcon components.

Usage

You can use material.io/tools/icons to find a specific icon. When importing an icon, keep in mind that the names of the icons are PascalCase, for instance:

delete is exposed as @material-ui/icons/Delete
delete forever is exposed as @material-ui/icons/DeleteForever

For *"themed"* icons, append the theme name to the icon name. For instance with the

The Outlined delete icon is exposed as @material-ui/icons/DeleteOutlined
The Rounded delete icon is exposed as @material-ui/icons/DeleteRounded
The Two Tone delete icon is exposed as @material-ui/icons/DeleteTwoTone
The Sharp delete icon is exposed as @material-ui/icons/DeleteSharp

There are three exceptions to this rule:

3d_rotation is exposed as @material-ui/icons/ThreeDRotation
4k is exposed as @material-ui/icons/FourK
360 is exposed as @material-ui/icons/ThreeSixty

Filled

Outlined

Rounded

Two Tone

Sharp

Edge-cases

Imports

If your environment doesn't support tree-shaking, the recommended way to import the icons is the following:

import AccessAlarmIcon from '@material-ui/icons/AccessAlarm';
import ThreeDRotation from '@material-ui/icons/ThreeDRotation';

If your environment support tree-shaking you can also import the icons this way:
```
import { AccessAlarm, ThreeDRotation } from '@material-ui/icons';
```

Note: Importing named exports in this way will result in the code for every icon being included in your project, so is not recommended unless you configure tree-shaking. It may also impact Hot Module Reload performance.

More SVG icons

Looking for even more SVG icons? There are a lot of projects out there, but https://materialdesignicons.com provides over 2,000 official and community provided icons. mdi-material-ui packages these icons as Material-UI SvgIcons in much the same way as @material-ui/icons does for the official icons.

Font Icons

The Icon component will display an icon from any icon font that supports ligatures. As a prerequisite, you must include one, such as the Material icon font in your project, for instance, via Google Web Fonts:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" />

Icon will set the correct class name for the Material icon font. For other fonts, you must supply the class name using the Icon component's className property.

To use an icon simply wrap the icon name (font ligature) with the Icon component, for example:

import Icon from '@material-ui/core/Icon';

<Icon>star</Icon>

By default, an Icon will inherit the current text color. Optionally, you can set the icon color using one of the theme color properties: primary, secondary, action, error & disabled.

Font Material icons

Font Awesome

Font Awesome can be used with the Icon component as follow:

Font vs SVG. Which approach to use?

Both approaches work fine, however, there are some subtle differences, especially in terms of performance and rendering quality. Whenever possible SVG is preferred as it allows code splitting, supports more icons, renders faster and better.

For more details, you can check out why GitHub migrated from font icons to SVG icons.

Accessibility

Icons can convey all sorts of meaningful information, so it’s important that they reach the largest amount of people possible. There are two use cases you’ll want to consider:

Decorative Icons are only being used for visual or branding reinforcement. If they were removed from the page, users would still understand and be able to use your page.
Semantic Icons are ones that you’re using to convey meaning, rather than just pure decoration. This includes icons without text next to them used as interactive controls — buttons, form elements, toggles, etc.

Decorative SVG Icons

If your icons are purely decorative, you’re already done! We add the aria-hidden=true attribute so that your icons are properly accessible (invisible).

Semantic SVG Icons

If your icon has semantic meaning, all you need to do is throw in a titleAccess="meaning" property. We add the role="img" attribute and the <title> element so that your icons are properly accessible.

In the case of focusable interactive elements, like when used with an icon button, you can use the aria-label property:

import IconButton from '@material-ui/core/IconButton';
import SvgIcon from '@material-ui/core/SvgIcon';

// ...

<IconButton aria-label="Delete">
  <SvgIcon>
    <path d="M20 12l-1.41-1.41L13 16.17V4h-2v12.17l-5.58-5.59L4 12l8 8 8-8z" />
  </SvgIcon>
</IconButton>

Decorative Font Icons