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I'm working on creating completely custom icons with AI and essentially exporting them out as an individual svg icons to be used in our app development.

I have been experimenting with different ways to effortlessly layout and export icons from working artboards within AI but not finding it comfortable.

The way I'm doing at this moment is having an main artboard only dedicated to working raw icons laid out in 24x24 grid (block) with subdivisions of 24 (creating lines in every pixel for high accuracy). Each icons are apart one block from each other.

When the icons ready to be exported out as a svg, its moved to a 24px by 24px individual artboards named according to the icon placed inside and the icons itself flattened (Compound Shape). This allows me to export the icons using individual small artboards to be exported as individual svg icons with its own unique name.

But I'm finding this tedious and think that there might be a better way to do this.

Any other way to streamline this process?

Thanks in advance.

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  • You can make a script, put each icon on a layer of its own its then easy to find the individual icons and deduce the name.
    – joojaa
    Aug 22, 2014 at 17:34
  • That is actually a really good idea to use script. I didn't think about that at all. Thanks for pointing out. Aug 22, 2014 at 18:18

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After getting a good hint from @joojaa, I tried to create my own script and ultimately I found a great script called MultiExporter that is made by TomByrne.

This script provides variety of options to export by layers or artboards, creating a ultimate streamline for tedious work of exporting many different individual icons. You get almost every possible exporting file formats.

Once you download the zip file, simply extract it and copy it to your illustrator script folder:

  • Mac installation: applications/adobe illustrator/presets/en_US/Scripts
  • Windows installation: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS5\Presets\Scripts

Once you copy paste the script, simply just restart your application.

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  • +1 multiexporter is great. One thing to be aware of with MultiExporter is that you MUST give your artboards names, else it won't export them. More info. The plus side is, when you do give them names, these are used in the exported images' filenames, which is very handy. Feb 19, 2015 at 17:13

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