Changing icon size and color in Iconify for Tailwind CSS

This documentation explains how to change icon size and color for addIconSelectors plugin.

Icon color

There are two types of icons:

• Icons with hardcoded palette.
• Monotone icons.

See how monotone icons work in CSS (html syntax in linked tutorial is different - tutorial is not specific to this plugin).

Monotone icons

To change the color of monotone icons, render them as mask images and change text color:

html<span class="iconify mdi-light--home text-blue-600"></span>

Icons with palette

Icons with hardcoded palette aren't designed to be customisable. However, addIconSelectors plugin gives you option to change color via customise option.

For example, this code will change yellow background in Twitter emojis with red:

jsaddIconSelectors({
   prefixes: [
       // Render 'twemoji' icon set
       'twemoji',
       // Render 'twemoji' as 'twemoji-red' with custom color changes
       {
           // Change icon set prefix by setting 'prefix' property
           prefix: 'twemoji-red',
           
           // Resolve location of icon set from '@iconify-json/twemoji' package
           // Also below is the same code, using '@iconify/json' package
           source: require.resolve('@iconify-json/twemoji/icons.json'),
           // source: require.resolve('@iconify/json/json/twemoji.json'),
           
           // Filter only icons that contain 'face' to improve plugin performance
           icons: (name) => name.includes('face'),
           
           // Change color
           customise: (content, name) => content.replaceAll('#ffcc4d', '#ff9667'),
       },
   ],
})

Then you can use both original and customised icons:

html<span class="iconify-color twemoji--winking-face"></span>
<span class="iconify-color twemoji-red--winking-face"></span>

See customise option documentation for details and usage examples.

Also see prefixes option documentation for explanation of how the configuration above works.

Icon size

By default, icons are rendered as 1em x 1em square.

To change icon size, you can change font size:

html<span class="iconify mdi-light--home text-2xl"></span>

Because common selectors, which contain size, are treated as Tailwind components, you can also set width/height to resize icon:

html<span class="iconify mdi-light--home w-12 h-12"></span>

Make sure width and height are identical. Some browsers (Safari) fail to keep proportions when using SVG as a mask image, so using different width and height values might result in unexpected user experience for some users.

Additionally, you can change default size by using scale option.

Scaling icon

Option scale changes default icon size from 1em.

The following configuration

jsaddIconSelectors({
   prefixes: ['mdi-light'],
   scale: 1.2,
})

changes default size to 1.2em x 1.2em square.

You can use font size to further resize icons, like in the example above, but icons will be 1.2 times bigger.

Fixed size

If you want to set default icon size to a fixed size in pixels, such as 24 to render icons that are designed for 24 x 24, you can set width and height in pixels using extraMaskRules or extraBackgroundRules options:

jsaddIconSelectors({
   maskSelector: '.material-icon',
   extraMaskRules: {
       'width': '24px',
       'height': '24px',
   },
   backgroundSelector: '.material-icon-color',
   extraBackgroundRules: {
       'width': '24px',
       'height': '24px',
   },
})

Multiple sizes

What if you want to use 1em icons, icons without size and icons with fixed size in pixels in the same project?

You can use multiple instances of plugin with different settings and different selectors:

jsplugins: [
   // Default options, 1em size
   addIconSelectors(['mdi-light']),
   // Fixed size
   addIconSelectors({
       // Set fixed size
       maskSelector: '.material-icon',
       extraMaskRules: {
           'width': '24px',
           'height': '24px',
       },
       // Not using background selector for this demo - demo uses monotone icons only
       backgroundSelector: '',
   })
]

html<p>
 Icon with 1em size:
 <span class="iconify mdi-light--home"></span>
</p>
<p>
 Using custom width/height:
 <span class="iconify mdi-light--home h-12 w-12"></span>
</p>
<p>
 24px icon:
 <span class="material-icon mdi-light--home"></span>
</p>

Because icon data is identical in all instances of plugin, there is no need to change icon selector and the prefixes option needs to be used only once. This reduces duplication and makes parsing faster.