Let’s say, for story-telling purposes, that our client has asked us to do a whole bunch of icons, among which two representing the concepts of ‘enter’ and ‘exit’. They are supposed to look consistent and you may need to deliver them in different sizes and formats.

Icon sets

Let’s go. We start by choosing File > New Icon Set:

A new document opens, and it already contains one emoji, a grinningFace (😀):

A fresh Icon Set window.

That is not what we want though, let’s rename the emoji glyph to icon.exit by clicking into its name and overwriting what was there. Alternatively, you can select the glyph and press Return or Enter, which selects the glyph name, and start typing.

It is generally a good idea to think of a smart naming strategy, think of something easily sortable and searchable, e.g. category.individualName. Your mileage may vary given the task at hand.

A glyph name must consist only of ASCII letters (A-Z, a-z), figures (0-9) as well as dot, hyphen and underscore (.-_). A name cannot contain spaces, and no other character beyond the aforementioned ones.

Careful with the allowed punctuation, though. A leading underscore is a convention of a non-exporting helper glyph. Underscores elsewhere in the name serve as ligature connectors, hyphens separate trailing script indicators. If that does not tell you anything, don’t worry. The giveaway for now: don’t use underscores and hyphens just yet. Stick to dots for bringing a structure to your names.

Editing

In order to edit our icon, let’s double click it. A new Edit tab opens, with our icon.exit open for editing. Let’s pick the Rectangle tool (shortcut F), and drag a square into the framed area of our glyph. The frame represents the edge of the image, anything exceeding it will be cut off. So I guess we better stay within the bounds. We do not need to be precise when dragging it because with the square selected, we can simply type the x and y coordinates for its center, as well as its width and height in the grey info box appearing below. Shall we put it in the center and make it 700 high and wide? Just click in one field, type the respective value, then tab to the next field, repeat until done:

Precisely setting a rectangle’s size and position.

In case you wondered, the lock button is for keeping the current height/width proportions when changing either value. The nine-point transformation origin works exactly as you imagine it. The figures on the side indicate the number of total and selected path points.

Now let’s give our square a good stroke, and by that I mean the Stroke setting in the bottom right of the window. Type in the stroke width (marked with the horizontal double arrow), or, use your up and down arrows for changing the existing value. Combine the arrow keys with Shift (⇧) for steps of 10, Shift-Command (⇧⌘) for steps of 100. I love me a value of a hundred, and I love my stroke to go into the inside, so I will pick the first of the three stroke position buttons:

Set (1) the stroke width and (2) the stroke position.

Next step. Let’s round the corners. For this we select the rectangle with the Select tool (shortcut V). Drag-select across it, or double click it and the entire shape is selected. Then, run Filter > Round Corners, and pick a rounding radius you like:

Rounding corners with Filter > Round Corners.

The Visual corrections option will pull the curve handles and on-curve nodes apart a bit so the curve transitions more smoothly into a straight line than a flat circle would do.

Masks

For the opening, we add another rectangle, just like we did before, only this time, we define it as a subtracting mask: in the bottom right, we click on the Not a Mask pop-up and switch it to Subtract:

Turning a shape into a subtracting mask.

Head components

Now, for the arrow, we click twice into the canvas with the Draw tool (P), the one with the pen icon in the toolbar. Now we have a line. In case we forgot to hold down Shift (⇧) and didn’t draw it horizontally, we can select it and press Cmd-Shift-A, the shortcut for Path > Align Selection, and the nodes will align orthogonally. If you are not a shortcut person, you can instead press the align button in the Transformations panel of the right sidebar.

For the arrow head, let’s try something cool. Choose Glyph > Add Glyphs… (⇧⌘G), and in the dialog that pops up, type _head.arrow, and press Generate:

Adding a new glyph with Glyph > Add Glyphs…

Cool, and we get a new glyph called _head.arrow. You guessed it, the prefix _head has a special meaning: it is a head component that has the superpower of attaching to an open path end. What we will do is draw an upward facing arrowhead:

Drawing the arrowhead: shaping with the bounding box and combining keys.

We start with a square, created with the Rectangle tool (F), select it, then move your mouse pointer a bit beyond one of the transformation handles to trigger a rotation. Note how the mouse arrow changes into a rotation symbol. Start dragging, add Option (⌥) for rotating around the center, Shift (⇧) for steps of 45°. The rest is easy peasy.

Do not forget to add anchors: choose Glyph > Set Anchors (⌘U), or Reset Anchors (⇧⌘U) in case you need to overwrite anchors you accidentally added before. This will add default anchors for head glyphs: direction and origin. Pull them apart vertically, keep the direction anchor below the origin anchor, it controls the orientation of the arrowhead and we want it to go straight. The origin anchor is where the arrowhead will dock onto the open path end, so you probably want to keep that one inside the shape.

Why do we do this in a separate _head glyph and not directly in the icon? Easy. So we can reuse it. In a set of many icons, you will likely have dozens of elements that are repeated over and over again. This is why Glyphs offers all kinds of components to make reusing shapes as efficient as possible.

Let’s attach the arrowhead to the end of the line in our icon. To move back to the icon, simply double click it to make it the active glyph again. In case the glyph does not show up in your Edit view anymore, you can insert it with Edit > Find > Find… (⌘F) and choosing which glyph to insert in th...

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