What is Grommet Icons?

Updated

Grommet Icons is the official icon library for the Grommet design system, published as the grommet-icons package and browsable at icons.grommet.io. It gives you a set of ready-made SVG icons you can drop into a React interface, and the site itself is a searchable catalog for finding the right icon by name or shape. It fits best if you are already building with Grommet or React and want icons that match that visual language; if you need a framework-agnostic icon set or a huge multi-style library, look elsewhere.

What the site actually provides

The catalog at icons.grommet.io is a browsing and lookup tool. Its practical value comes down to three things:

  • A visual index of every icon in the set, so you can scan for the symbol you need instead of guessing names.
  • The exact icon name to use in code, which is the part that matters most — the name you see is the name you import.
  • A consistent style across the whole set, since all icons are drawn to work together within Grommet's design language.

The icons themselves are delivered as a package rather than as downloadable image files you manage by hand. That means the site is for finding icons, and your package manager is for installing them.

How it relates to Grommet

Grommet is a React-based component library for building responsive, accessible interfaces. Grommet Icons is its companion icon set, so the two are designed to be used together:

Aspect What it means for you
Framework Built for React; icons render as React components
Styling Icons accept size and color props, so they inherit your theme
Consistency Shares the visual conventions of Grommet components
Scope Icons only — not a general-purpose UI kit

If you are not using React, the icons are still SVGs at heart, but the intended consumption path (importing components) assumes a React build.

How you would use it

A typical workflow looks like this:

  1. Browse icons.grommet.io and find the icon whose shape matches your need.
  2. Note the name shown for that icon — this is the component name.
  3. Install the package through your project's package manager.
  4. Import and render the icon as a component in your React code, passing props like size or color to match your layout.

The expected result is an inline SVG that scales cleanly and picks up the color you set, rather than a fixed-size image asset.

When to choose it — and when not to

Choose Grommet Icons if you are building a React app, especially one already using Grommet, and you want a coherent icon set with minimal styling work.

Consider alternatives if you need icons in Vue, Svelte, or plain HTML without a React dependency; if you want multiple visual styles (outline, filled, duotone) in one library; or if you need a much larger catalog spanning many design languages.

The main trade-off is coherence versus breadth: Grommet Icons gives you a tight, consistent set that fits its system well, but it is not trying to be a universal icon repository.

Common sticking points

  • Confusing the site with the package. The website is for discovery; the icons come from installing the package.
  • Assuming framework independence. The documented usage is React-oriented, so plan accordingly.
  • Expecting every possible symbol. Like most design-system icon sets, it covers common UI needs rather than exhaustive categories.

If your goal is simply to see what icons exist and what they are called, the site alone answers that. If your goal is to ship them in an app, treat the site as the index and the package as the source.