These are two different official icon sets from Google, using the same underlying designs. Material Symbols is the current set, introduced in April 2022, built on variable font technology. Material Icons is the classic set, but no longer updated. More details below.
The icons can be browsed in a more user-friendly way at https://fonts.google.com/icons. Use the popdown menu near top left to choose between the two sets; Material Symbols is the default.
The icons are designed under the material design guidelines.
We’d love to support your icon needs! Please submit your request here on GitHub as an issue.
Please note that Google Fonts does not accept user submissions of finished icon designs! There are fairly strict guidelines for Material icons, plus Google has upstream source files from which this repo is generated. Therefore, Google does not accept pull requests for icon files (whether new icon suggestions, or fixes for existing icons). Concepts are appreciated—just don’t design SVGs and submit them via pull request.
However, users are perfectly welcome to point at outside files or images as examples—for the kind of thing they want, but they won’t just be taken “as is.” This works especially well if you have multiple examples for a single icon, to help us understand the “essence” of the idea.
For example, there is a fairly universal conceptual logo/icon for “agender,” so if you were proposing Google add an agender icon in the Material style, either mentioning that, or pointing at https://www.google.com/search?q=agender+icon would be a helpful tip.
Currently, Google does not include 3rd-party logos among the Material Symbols or Material Icons due to legal reasons. Some 3rd-party logos that were included in the past have since been removed.
Google does not currently maintain the npm package for this repo, past v3 (2016). However, user @marella is hosting the following. He tells us these are automatically updated and published using GitHub Actions. Note: Google does not monitor or vet these packages.
material-icons package
These newer icons can be browsed in a more user-friendly way at https://fonts.google.com/icons. Use the popdown menu near top left to choose between the two sets; Material Symbols is the default.
These icons were built/designed as variable fonts first (based on the 24 px designs from Material Icons). There are three separate Material Symbols variable fonts, which also have static icons available (but those do not have all the variations available, as that would be hundreds of styles):
Each of the fonts has these design axes, which can be varied in CSS, or in many more modern design apps:
The following directories in this repo contain specifically Material Symbols (not Material Icons) content:
What is currently not available in Material Symbols?
The icons can be browsed in a more user-friendly way at https://fonts.google.com/icons?icon.set=Material+Icons
These classic icons are available in five distinct styles:
The following directories in this repo contain specifically Material Icons (not Material Symbols) content:
What is currently not available in Material Icons?
Read the developer guide on how to use the material design icons in your project.
The font and variablefont folders contain pre-generated font files that can be included in a project. This is especially convenient for the web; however, it is generally better to link to the web font hosted on Google Fonts:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Material+Icons" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Material+Symbols+Outlined" rel="stylesheet">
Read more on Material Symbols or Material Icons in the Google Fonts developer guide.
We have made these icons available for you to incorporate into your products under the Apache License Version 2.0. Feel free to remix and re-share these icons and documentation in your products. We‘d love attribution in your app’s about screen, but it's not required.