Sharable Collection configs

[BotiKis]

This is for far future once #64 and #54 are there.

Userstory

As a designer

As a designer I want to share a collection and it's metadata with my team.
As a designer I create the icons, set up the collection with subcollections and add tags to the icons.
Now I want to share this setup with my devs.

As a dev

As a dev I wan't a simple experience so I can focus on coding. I don't want to toy around with creating collections and tagging and use the app for productivitiy. I want open a config and it should magically work.

Possible implementation

Maybe a config file I can export and ship with the icons folder in git (or a zipfile, whatever).

[MrRobz]

Thanks for the idea @BotiKis.
Expanding IconShelf to designers is something I'm also interested in.

Could you answer a few questions about designer-> dev icon workflow in your case:

1. Can you give me some examples of tags you might create for icons.
2. Do devs ask for just one icon at a time or the whole collection.

[BotiKis]

Of course - glad to help.

1 Tags

I would assign tags for multiple reasons:

Allows synonyms

Certain things are often called in different languages in multiple ways. A person maybe wouldnt' try to find an icon under the same name as another. By allowing to tag an icon with multiple tags can improve this a lot.

Example

I call an icon ic_preferences which displays a wrench 🔧.
Somebody else sees it in the designs and searches for Settings and won't find it.
Another person might search for Wrench bc that's what it is.

This can be avoided by tagging the icon with synonyms.

Grouping

Besides subdirectories that will be very useful to structure a set, providing custom tags in addition also helps.
Especially with a big design system streching over multiple products and projects.

Example

Imaging have a structure like:

• Website
• Application A
• Application B
• Print

Now we are creating a new project called marketplace which is mainly on the website but is integrated in Application A and Print too. I would put the icons in website but tag them also with marketplace so it's easier to find in bulk.

Experience and what we done

This is just my experience and maybe inspiration for you.
In my company we have a similar issue organising +10k assets for a graphic design application. We decided to go full in with tags and introduced scopes to our system. Scopes are just keywords separated by colons : in a tag. There are normal tags but also predefined scope we are using for categorisation.

Example

We introduced the scope category. Any item can be tagged with multiple categories and appear there in our application.
category:foo:bar, category:foo:lul, category:color:blues:turquoise, category:vehicles:cars
An item tagged like this will appear in the UI under:

foo
  |- bar
  |- lul
color
  |- color
    |- blues
      |- turquise
vehicles
  |- cars

2 one icon at a time or the whole collection

Really depends on the individual dev. Both happens.
I've used to send a dev the whole current pack when they requested an Icon, hoping they all updated all icons but that totally didn't work out.

They are just focused on their single task and don't care about others. (Not blaming here anyone).
Also they ain't talking to each other and adding the same icon multiple times into the project which makes updating an icon annoyingly tedious.

As a solution I've created a git repo with all icons which I keep up to date.
If anyone from the team (devs, designers, marketing) needs any ressources they find it there.
It is prohibited to rename icons so they must use the original names from git.

Unfortunately git is awful for finding icons visually or by a search. Best way is to clone the repo and use the search function of Finder oder the File explorer.

Because that ain't nice either, i searched for a tool and found Icon-Shelf ;).

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Sorry for the long post 🥔