How to preserve icon color override and size?

What if only the icon was wrapped in a union, and not the entire component?

You can see this file:

Thanks @tank666 for your file.

I have two large libraries I’m managing for my team (one for icons, one for UI components) and was struggling to make icon colors work for both dark and light theme for several hours this afternoon. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Do the Union trick from Rogie’s file: for me, I duplicate my expanded icon in place (cmd+d), then union the two dupes, delete one of them, rename the union item to something like “color_fix”, the icon vector itself to “Union”, and the frame containing it all to the name I want for the icon (e.g. “keyboard”). Convert this to a component if it isn’t one already.
2. Make sure all the items are set to Scale for height and width
3. Make sure no color styles are applied anywhere in the stack; just some generic black color or whatever
4. Publish the icon library
5. Accept the icon library updates in the UI components library
6. In the UI components library have a component with two icons in it, one for light theme and one for dark
7. Use those icon components throughout the UI components library file.
8. Apply the colors you want to the light icon and dark icon (I applied the color on the level of the item labeled “color_fix”)

Doing all of that enabled me to actually see the icons scale correctly to several different sizes within different components and also reflect the correct color depending on which theme the UI component pertained to.

Thanks for the advices above. I actually remade all of my buttons 😅 in order to fix the icon size. One thing I learned is that Rogie’s trick works, but it’s very important to set a frame for the icon first rather than having the union then create a frame to wrap it.

I must say that this sounds like a workaround to a bug. Wondering if this will be fixed soon as it makes using variants and interactive components nearly pointless when there is an icon-placeholder

Update: problem fixed with naming each shape for each icon with the same name. Color override works properly now. There is no bug.

Variant icon color not being static is definitely a bug. I’m totally against hacks like this as it complicates the components, I remember the Sketch icon masks I had to maintain.

I don’t like hacks either, but I do like that my icons are now getting the right color for each theme, even when I override the icon selection for, say, a button. My update to this thread is that I now am no longer using an icon component with a dark and light version; I’m just letting the parent component (say, the button) do the color overriding and it seems to be working. I probably don’t need the icon container anymore, but I also don’t want to touch it because it’s working.

thanks KubaA, this is definitely the best way to address preserving icon colors! 💯

Seems like it will also work to use a modified version of Rogie’s trick where you put a union within each icon component rather than within the button component that contains the icon. I think I prefer that way, since they’re already framed, and I don’t have more nested components to click around in my button. I almost never have to dig deep into the icon component itself, so the union there is mostly out of sight, out of mind.

This was 100% the answer. My team uses FontAwesome as glyphs… So we originally had every layer named the FontAwesome html (far fa-icon-name) so devs would know which icon to use exactly. Just had to copy/paste that into the Description instead and then rename all the layers to the same name: “Icon”. Works perfectly now!! Thanks so much 🙂

It’s all in the name. I just found out 🤦‍♂️. over 500 icons in our DS each one of them in a symbol 16 x 16 with a unique name off course. But the element inside could have different names like “vector”, “union”, “primary”, or whatever. Once I noticed that elements with the same name didn’t switch color I’ve named every element “vector” and it works. Now I have to change this hack back again 🤦‍♂️