Transform my icon SVGs to 32px x 32px icons in Inkscape

Question

I'm a newbie to designing things in Inkscape. I'm developing a website, in which the tabbed content will have icons.

Some of the icons I designed, I see, aren't uniformly 32px x 32px, when I set the X-axis width to 32px. I want all my icons to be 32px x 32px, because all the sites I've been studying, use 32px x 32px and the benefit I see in that is uniformity, and that it's a W3C standard or something.

Anyways, here's my icon:

How can I resize it to 32px x 32px without the malforming weirdness? TBH, I tried setting the dimensions manually without preserving the original aspect ratio, but still the thing wouldn't be 32px x 32px exactly.

Answer 1

Rotate the icon clockwise until the stem of the magnifying glass is at a 45 degree angle. That will give it more of a square composition to begin with, and then you'll be able to scale it with without distorting anything.