Side project
Mono
An open-source icon set of 320 glyphs drawn on one strict grid — used in products I'll never see.
- Client
- Open source
- Role
- Designer & maintainer
- Year
- 2024
Mono started as a weekend of frustration with icon sets that almost matched. Six years later it's 320 glyphs, one stroke weight, one grid, and a test suite that rejects any icon that breaks the rules.
The rules are the product
Every glyph is drawn on a 16px grid with a 1.5px stroke, rounded terminals, and a fixed optical margin. The consistency isn't a style choice — it's the feature. Icons from version one still sit perfectly beside icons added last month.
Maintenance as design practice
Reviewing community contributions taught me more about visual systems than any client project: writing rules precise enough that a stranger can draw an icon I'd approve is design at its most honest.
Mono ships as SVG, a web font, and a Figma library, and gets about 40k npm downloads a month.