The Icons category is a searchable catalogue of single-colour, line-art icons. Because they are drawn in one colour, every icon takes on your theme's colour automatically, so a whole diagram stays visually consistent. It sits on the palette strip in Diagram, Facilitate and Illustrate mode.
Browsing by category
The catalogue is organised into categories so you can browse when you are not sure what you want: Animated, Tech, People, Security, Files, Charts, Arrows, Furniture, and UI. Its panel lists the categories down the left, each with its count; click one to see every icon it holds on the right. It opens on the first, and after that on the one you last had open.
Furniture holds top-down floor-plan symbols (beds, sofas, tables, a door, stairs) for sketching room layouts, and Animated holds the few icons that move.
Searching and placing
When you know what you need, type in Search icons (for example "server", "heart", or "calendar") and the catalogue filters to matching icons as you type. Search always looks across every category, so you never have to guess which one an icon lives in.
Click an icon to place it, or drag across the canvas to draw it at the size you want; it keeps its proportions either way. Then resize and position it like any other element. Its colour follows your theme, so changing the theme recolours every placed icon at once. To pick a colour of your own, right-click it, open Style, then Colours, and set the Icon colour; Reset to Theme puts it back.
Type while an icon is selected to give it a caption. The glyph keeps to the side opposite the text: move the caption to the top and the art drops below it, align it left and the art shifts right. To put the text on the art itself, such as a number in a circle or a skull on a flag, pick the centre of the Alignment grid in the editing toolbar: the glyph keeps its full size and the text sits on top of it.
Putting an icon inside a shape
An icon can also sit beside a shape's own label rather than standing alone:
- Drag an icon from the palette onto a shape. It lands on the side of the text nearest where you let go; a highlight shows which side before you release.
- Click an icon while a shape is selected, and it goes on that shape's left.
- Drag an icon already on the canvas onto a shape, and it folds in.
To move or remove it, right-click the shape and open the Icon section. Frames, and the elements that draw their own faces (collaboration cards, buttons, stickers), don't take inline icons: an icon dropped on them stays a separate element.
Swapping an icon
To change a placed icon for a different one without losing its place, drop the new icon straight onto it:
- Drag an icon from the Icons or Technology category onto a placed icon. The whole icon highlights while it is the target.
- Drag an icon already on the canvas onto another one. The one you dragged is used up, and the one you dropped it on takes its glyph.
The icon keeps its position, size, rotation, colour, weight and caption; only the glyph changes. Any icon swaps with any other, a Technology tile included, and the swap is a single step that Undo reverses. It works the same in every mode.
Line weight
Right-click a placed icon and open Weight to draw it Thin, Regular or Bold. Hover a tile to preview it on the canvas first. The weight holds at any size and zoom, so a large icon never turns into a heavy brush stroke. New icons start at Regular, the same weight as the icons in the editor itself. Select several icons to set them all at once.
Looking for emoji?
Colour emoji have their own palette category: see Stickers. They used to sit here as an Emoji category, and moved out so this category is purely line art that follows your theme.
Line-art icons versus technology tiles
These icons are deliberately single-colour and abstract. If you need full-colour service tiles for cloud providers and infrastructure, look in the Technology category (Tech in the dropdown) instead, which keeps AWS, Azure, and similar services in their providers' colours rather than your theme colour.
Stuck on the right icon? Search a synonym: many icons answer to more than one common name, so "delete" and "bin" may both turn up the same result.
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