Case Study

Designing an icon library

tl;dr

Designing a library of more than 300 icons that became part of Paymentus' design system. To support consistent implementation across products, I also developed a downloadable icon font and partnered with Engineering to drive its adoption across the company's digital payment platform. The icon library remains in active use today.

A collection of more than 300 icons designed to provide a consistent visual language across Paymentus’ digital products. The library supports navigation, feature discoverability, and usability while enabling a cohesive user experience.

The icon library was built on a shared construction grid that established consistent proportions while allowing for optical refinement, ensuring every icon appeared balanced and aligned when used alongside text and UI components.

The icon system was built on a consistent 100 × 100 px grid, with each icon aligned to the baseline of the Proxima Nova typeface used throughout Paymentus’ products. Designing the icons around the typography minimized alignment adjustments during implementation and ensured they sat naturally alongside text in production.

Each icon was carefully crafted and optically balanced to ensure consistent visual perception, with subtle geometric adjustments applied where necessary to achieve visual harmony

The icon system was designed around the typography used throughout Paymentus’ products, ensuring icons aligned consistently with text and required minimal manual adjustment in production.

Icons were designed as part of a broader visual system, using consistent styling and paired variants to communicate meaning while reinforcing a cohesive user experience.

Building icons as reusable components enabled related actions to share a common visual foundation, improving consistency while reducing the need to create entirely new icons.

A consistent dual-style approach enabled the same icon to communicate varying levels of emphasis without sacrificing recognizability.

The library was initially developed as an outline icon set to provide a clean and consistent visual language. As the design system evolved, I introduced filled variants for icons primarily used in buttons and other high-emphasis interactive controls, improving affordance while maintaining consistency across the system.

Paired outline and filled variants provided visual flexibility while preserving consistency across different UI contexts.

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