Use Artboards & Export to Auto-tag Icons

Live by the Tag, Die by the Tag

You have created a masterpiece of icon design. You are ready to release your creation to the icon-buying market. It is time to add some high-quality tags so customers can find them. Tagging on Iconfinder, for the time-being, requires human judgment to evaluate the contents and meaning of each icon to tag them in a meaningful way so that users of the site can find the icons they need.

In this article, we will show you how to prepare your Adobe Illustrator artboards to streamline tagging your icons when you upload them to Iconfinder. When we are finished, you will have a solid understanding of how tagging works on Iconfinder and how you can make tagging a normal part of your design workflow and not a separate task to slow you down when uploading icons. Be sure to check out our earlier blog post on Artboards and Export for Screens for a much more in-depth look at design workflows in Adobe Illustrator.

What’s in a Name?

When you export artboards from Adobe Illustrator, the artboard names will become the output file names. In turn, when you upload the icons to Iconfinder, the file names will be automatically converted to tags. Each segment of a file name, whether separated by spaces, underscores, or dashes will be used as an individual tag. You can think of the file names, artboard names, and tags as different representations of the same metadata similar to the way that steam, liquid, and ice are all different states of water.

A useful trick when naming your artboards is to think of the tags in order of specificity from the most general to more specific. This is similar to the animal classification taxonomy we all learned in school: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Of course, your file names don’t need to be that scientific but having meaningful names/tags will help you and potential customers identify your icons more quickly and easily. Additionally, when you export your artboards related files will naturally group together on the file system when sorted alphabetically. For instance, if you have a group of icons of user avatars you can name them something like “avatar-man-older-doctor”, “avatar-man-younger-fireman”, “avatar-woman-younger-doctor”, “avatar-girl-computer-programmer”, etc.

With that bit of background, let’s set up our artboards.

Setting Up the Exports

The image below shows the settings we recommend for SVG exports. You can access the SVG export settings by opening the Export for Screens dialog, then clicking the small gear in the “Formats” section of the dialog. Select the SVG item from the list on the left-hand side of the Format Settings dialog. A detailed explanation of each setting is beyond the scope of this article, however, a few quick comments about the settings. The Styling setting indicates whether CSS rules are added to the document as attributes on the SVG (XML) elements or as a separate <style> block. To keep the SVG code more readable, we recommend the Internal CSS option. A precision of 3 decimal places — thousands of a whole number — is more than enough for most display purposes. Lastly, it is best to not make icons responsive. If they are responsive they will resize according to the viewer size. Non-responsive will make the icons a constant size no matter the display. You can also choose to minify the SVG output but for uploading to Iconfinder it is not necessary.

Export

With your export presets saved, you can select the artboards you want to export. We have talked at length about Export for Screens in other blog posts here and here but the details are worth repeating.

To access Export for Screens, you can type the keys Command + Option + E on Mac OS or Control + Alt + E on Windows. You can also access the export wizard by going to File > Export > Export for Screens in the application menu.

In the Export for Screens window, specify which artboards you want to export. Your choices are to export all or a range (or ranges). Select your output folder, then select the export size and format. Since you will be uploading to Iconfinder, you only need to export the icons in SVG at full size. When you select SVG export, the size is set by default to 1X. Iconfinder’s system will create the PNG, ICO, CSH, and other formats.

Iconfinder only accepts the SVG icon files. We programmatically generate all of the other sizes and formats as part of the file processing during upload. Once you have exported the SVG files, you will notice that the artboard names have become the names of the individual icons.

We also recommend using some kind of repository service for your icons. Scott Lewis, Iconfinder’s Head of Content and long-time icon designer, prefers to use GitHub but there are other options, including the DropBox Plus plan, which gives you 30-day access to your file history and backups of your files. Which backup and version scheme works for you is yours to decide but you’ve spent a lot of time creating your icons, it is a good idea to make sure they are protected from catastrophic loss.

Upload

After you have verified that your final icons are ready to sell, it is time to upload them to Iconfinder. We won’t list the individual steps for uploading here but check out the short video below for a demonstration. The point of this article and the key thing of note here is that by taking a little time to carefully name your artboards, your tagging is handled automatically when you upload your files. Iconfinder’s system converts your delimited file names into individual tags. You will need to inspect each icon’s tags just to make sure they are converted correctly and will help customers find your icons, but the vast majority of the keying in of tags has been done automatically. And since Adobe Illustrator now supports 1,000 artboards, you can manage most icon sets in a single file and store your tags as part of the source file.

Conclusion

We have shown you a simple but effective approach for using Adobe Illustrator’s 1,000 artboards to manage your icons and tags. As a creative professional, your time is best spent creating and your tools should make that task easier and almost, if not fully, second-nature. Now, with support for up to 1,000 artboards, Adobe Illustrator better empowers you to focus more on your creativity and less on the tedium of working with dozens of files on each project.

P.S. We are giving you a special free download of the icon set seen in the screenshots, which includes a handpicked selection of business and finance icons from the Unigrid Phantom collection by Icojam.