Lucide Icons That Fit the Site
Small icons, big role: why Lucide fits this site and how Astro and Vue bring its SVGs to life with clear labels.
Small interface details should feel like they belong together. A search icon, a disclosure chevron, and a copy control do different jobs, but they should share a visual language.
Lucide gives this site that consistency: simple SVG outlines, rounded ends, and enough restraint to sit comfortably beside text.
What Are Lucide Icons?
Lucide is an open-source library of vector icons: small drawings that represent actions, objects, and ideas. Think magnifying glasses for search, suns and moons for themes, and the occasional balloon when things need a little lift.
The icons are SVGs, or Scalable Vector Graphics. Each drawing is described with shapes and paths, so the browser can render it at different sizes. You can use the SVG files directly or work with official components for frameworks such as Astro and Vue.
What Makes Them Great
The collection feels like a family. Shared design rules keep the outlines, proportions, and level of detail consistent, so adding a new icon does not mean introducing a new visual style. Community contributors extend that shared vocabulary with more symbols and variants.
The practical details are just as useful:
- SVG stays sharp. The same geometry works at small control sizes and larger illustration sizes without separate raster assets.
- Color follows the interface. The default stroke uses
currentColor, so icons inherit text color, including theme changes and hover states. - Styling is flexible. Size and stroke width are adjustable, making it easy to fit an icon beside a label without redrawing it.
- Imports stay specific. Named imports let the build include the icons a component uses and discard unused exports.
Lucide’s Astro guide documents those component and styling defaults. For this site, they mean fewer individual assets to maintain and fewer visual decisions to repeat. The shared design tokens still control the color palette.
Why It Fits This Site
This is a reading site. Icons help readers recognize actions without competing with the writing. Lucide’s open shapes fit the thin borders and quiet typography already used here. Search, theme controls, and portfolio navigation can share one visual language while the words keep center stage.
Most interface icons on this site are 16 × 16 pixels, including search, footer links, theme controls, portfolio navigation, About-page icons, and Colophon copy controls. Navigation and topic-filter disclosure chevrons are smaller at 14 × 14 pixels, while the GSAP midway-map chevron uses 16 × 16 pixels. The collection above enlarges the icons to 32 × 32 pixels so their shapes are easier to compare.
How This Site Implements It
Static pages and components import from @lucide/astro. The homepage uses Search; navigation and topic controls use ChevronDown; copy controls use Copy and Check. Astro renders those components into inline SVG during the build. Displaying an icon needs no browser JavaScript or separate image request.
The portfolio islands import from @lucide/vue. Their carousel uses ChevronLeft, ChevronRight, Pause, and Play; the image viewer uses ZoomIn and ZoomOut. Vue can switch the pause and play icons alongside the existing autoplay state. That code belongs to the interactive gallery, following the same rule for Vue islands as the rest of the site.
The two packages give static markup and interactive controls the same icon language. The GSAP playground also embeds Lucide SVG markup directly, including party, route, and shuffle icons. Its controls swap arrow and play/pause SVGs as their state changes. The graphic above includes those icons, too.
A Small Example
The homepage’s search submit button pairs a 16-pixel Search icon with visible text. Here is a standalone link using the same idea:
---
import { Search } from "@lucide/astro";
---
<a href="/search/" class="site-link inline-flex items-center gap-2">
<Search size={16} stroke-width={2} aria-hidden="true" />
Search notes and projects
</a>The example above renders a real inline SVG. Its stroke inherits the link color, so it follows the site’s light and dark themes without a separate color setting.
aria-hidden="true" keeps the decorative magnifying glass out of the accessibility tree. The visible words name the destination. For an icon-only button, the name belongs on the button instead: the portfolio’s next control uses aria-label="Next portfolio item" and hides the chevron from assistive technology.
An icon’s dimensions also do not define the whole click target. The portfolio places small chevrons inside larger buttons, leaving room around the drawing.
Lucide supplies the shapes. Choosing a recognizable action, keeping useful labels, and giving controls enough space are still design decisions this site has to make.