I’ve now spent enough time over the last few years that I feel confident saying that making SF Symbols from scratch is a much, much more difficult problem than it should be. It’s challenging, but not in a fun way. There are no methods to diagnose errors. And like Icon Composer for making Liquid Glass app icons, Apple’s insistence to have a finishing tool in the pipeline of icon creation is just placing a stumbling block between the work and the finished product.

For myself, for clients, I have tried to find a good workflow for getting artwork drawn and used as SF Symbols, but it is just frankly not worth it. The extra time required to make a variable SF Symbol is 10–20 times longer than creating an icon and saving it as a PDF or SVG.

To reiterate, I can make 10 or 20 icons in the time it takes to make one variable SF Symbol.

Time will tell with Icon Composer, but to make a Liquid Glass icon, I’ve had to go back and forth between Photoshop and Icon Composer or Illustrator and Icon Composer just to get the finished result to look how I intend it to. I used to be able to finish icons in Photoshop or Illustrator, and just save PNG files. But with an additional app required to create SF Symbols or Liquid Glass app icons, Apple made it more cumbersome to do my job than ever before, with results that not even necessarily better. They’re just different.

For all the work Apple has done to make apps easier to build for developers, these two tools have done the opposite for designers. I know no one who enjoys making an SF Symbol. Not to mention, only a very small percentage of my clients even want them, because they often build cross-platform (including for the web) where using SF Symbols is impossible due to licensing restrictions or file format.

It’s just not worth it.