It’s been a year of dimensionality with Apple’s Liquid Glass, Airbnb’s 2D-to-3D design language, and glassy experiments across the internet. The flat design backlash is here.
Though icons can adopt this dimensionality as well, monochrome glyphs aren’t going anywhere. They are one of the most economical ways of representing an idea.
Here are my 6 favorite icon sets from 2025, followed by icon news.
Chisel is finally out! (I mentioned it in 2023.) Laura Bohill’s variable stroke icon set is oozing with character. I have too many favorites to name but I’ll name a few—the eye, sailboat, music note, percent sign, skull, paw, flower, bug—what a bug.
As part of a major rebrand of the Philadelphia Art Museum (formerly the Philadelphia Museum of Art), Gretel introduced a new custom typeface Fairmount Serif with Ryan Bugden and an icon system to complement. The whole project is done so well, referencing the history of the museum and city in a deeply thoughtful way. Read more: Gretel’s case study and Brand New’s coverage.
Evgeniy makes some of the most unique and experimental icons out there. I’m featuring this curvy set, where I’m really drawn to the pinch in the arrowheads and paper plane — but you really have to see his body of work.
Zed Icons is an impressive variable icon system by Typotheque (design: Ondrej Jób, engineering: Rafał Buchner), meant to pair well with Zed Text and Zed Display. Its typographic approach and neutral style remind me of SF Symbols.
You can adjust the style along a few axes—weight, optical size, and rounding—with variable font technology (à la Material Symbols).
I appreciate the attention to accessibility and localization. Zed Icons flip direction to support right-to-left languages and offer cultural variants—like alternatives to the cross for “First Aid.”
An 8x8 grid sounds impossible, but Marek Minor turned the constraint into an endearing set of icons. I especially dig the treatments of the hands and figures, which are some of the hardest icons to land.
QIMR Berghofer, an Australian medical research institute, got a vibrant rebrand from Bigfish. A key motif in their new identity is a cellular pattern that’s cleverly cropped in a hexagon to make the logo and generated with a custom tool to make background textures.
Airbnb redesigned their entire app, featuring services and experiences at the same level as homes. This comes with a new icon design language that steps from 2D glyphs to animated 3D icons. It’s a nice interpretation of gracefully reducing/increasing detail with size.
With Apple’s new Liquid Glass language, app icons are changing in a major way. The grids have been adjusted, layers now adopt the glass material, and a squircle mask will be applied, so objects can no longer extend beyond the container shape. A new tool, Icon Composer, helps you create artwork with multiple layers. I’ve seen some icons improve under this standardization (I quite like the new Photo Booth), but a lot of character is lost as well.
Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston came out in July, surveying the short history of emoji. It packs a lot of information in a quick read. See also: The Emoji Code by Vyvyan Evans from 2017, a beautifully written examination of emoji alongside its companion technology — words.
