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For designers who are building a data model, adding icons makes the application more visually appealing to business users. However, this task can seem like a cumbersome afterthought.

Picking icons doesn't have to be difficult. Setting icons for your entities right away makes the application more usable to business users and data stewards. It's also convenient to set it immediately so that when you create the application components, the components can use the icons you've set.

How to find good icons

1. Use the built-in Image Library. It's been populated with material design icons. You can search for existing icons by entering keywords, such as account, flag, people, etc. However, the name of icons isn't always intuitively linked to your search terms. For example, "account" will show you people icons that are suitable for B2C entities, but you might not think to search on "account". Use option 2 below to overcome this issue.
2. Browse this website: https://materialdesignicons.com/. xDM ships with all of these icons and the search on this website can look at aliases so that multiple search terms can lead to appropriate icons.
3. Consider the following list of commonly used icons.

NOTE: Some icons in the Material Design Icons website may not appear in the Image Library yet. Ask a Customer Success team member to request a refresh to add the new icons.

Commonly used icons

These icons are Semarchy favorites. We frequently associated these icons with certain domains, such as companies, people, products, etc. It's a good starting point.

NOTE: Below is an example of using the icon. The syntax is the same as the icons in the table above.

Internal Semarchy Note: This article originally appeared in Confluence.