Hi Kasper, Sounds like a pretty complicated setup you’ve got there.

We use Material Icons because they are well drawn, well packaged. Drawing icons and exporting is a science and art to do well, this article is really only covering the workflow involved in implementing icon fonts–not creating them.

There is, however, a good link at the foot of my post about an Sketch+Grunt workflow which explains how to build your artwork into an icon font. This is a semi-automated process and looks very promising–though I have not tried it. Overall suggestion… If you want to build a custom icon font I would recommend doing that in an external project to keep things tidy. As you can see in my workflow above, I only use a few base Symbols in my working project so that “dirty” artwork like icon drawings are kept separate. Doing everything in the same project will be unsustainable in the longrun.

I will probably do an article on creating->exporting icon artwork. It is something I have solved before using Illustrator. I would like to build the same process in Sketch, maybe build a plugin. I will share how that is done once I’ve worked it out.

Thanks for your question and I hope that helps.