# Icon design guidelines
> Guidelines for designing new Wave icons.

## Icon grid ingredients

The icon grid provides a structured base for our icons. The foundation of the final grid is a **pixel grid** — which means that each square of the grid maps directly to a single pixel on a computer screen.
Wave icons are drawn on a 24px x 24px canvas and scaled linearly to different sizes. The primary building block is a 2px centered stroke.

When building icons, you always want to align objects to the pixel grid, especially straight lines. This way you'll ensure the design remains crisp.
Also, spacing things evenly is much easier when you're using a grid. It helps you stay consistent with your placement, and overall makes the icons look better.

### Keyshapes

Another important ingredient of the icon grid are **keyshapes**. Keyshapes provide template shapes to start from: a circle, square, portrait rectangle, and landscape rectangle.
They ensure that each icon takes up a similar amount of volume, regardless of its overall shape, which helps ensure that icons retain a similar optical weight.

Each shape has different dimensions, but they all have a similar visual balance. Use key shapes as the basic building block for icon consistency.

See how keyshapes translate into some icon glyphs:

Keyshapes are just guidelines of course, sometimes you may need to extend beyoned the keyshapes for proper form. Drop the guidelines when they stop working for you.

### Final grid

Other elements of the grid include **orthogonals** and **padding / trim area**.

Orthogonals referer to keylines that intersect the center point of the icon. They slice the canvas at 90° and 45°.
Make sure to align slashes to a 45° orthogonal. 45° angles are best (after straight lines) because the pixels used to define the angle are stacked, or stepped diagonally.

Padding is the area reserving the outer 1px for visual weighting. Padding is a soft guidance and sometimes you may need a wider shape that extends to the edges of the canvas.

Take a look at some of the icons placed on the final grid:

## Strokes & rounding

Wave icons are created with a **2px centered stroke** to create a sense of lightness.
Be consistent with 2px stroke to maintain the same visual weight for all icons.

Object corners are primarily rounded by 2px, except in some cases where
a larger radius makes sense to better reflect the real form of the object (like the bevels of a phone, or some exterior obtuse angles).
The 2px radius can be increased by a multiple of two when necessary.

If you are juxtaposing two or more elements together (for example on top of each other), add a 2px stroke break/gap.

Use rounded stroke terminals and rounded line joins keep the icon smooth.