Inside the Spectrum Icon Assistant: Three Workflows, One Smart Pipeline

Introduction

Adobe Designers rely on icons every day, but finding the right icon at Adobe hasn’t always been easy. With more than 20,000+ icons spread across 70+ Figma files, manually searching for the right asset can slow designers down significantly.

Meanwhile, the Icon/Brand team often spends a huge amount of time in Slack repeatedly helping others locate icons and product logos — time that could be better spent designing and evolving the system.

To solve this, we brought AI-powered icon discovery directly into Slack, where designers already collaborate. This blog introduces the three new workflows now available inside Slack, along with a high-level data-flow diagram that powers the experience.

Overview of the three AI workflows

We introduced three complementary workflows to help designers find icons in the way that feels most natural:

• Find icon by text — describe what you need using natural language

• Find icon by image — upload a screenshot to search visually

• Ask a question — ask general icon usage questions powered by Agentic reasoning

Workflow demo: Find icon by text

The first workflow lets you describe an icon using semantics, visual cues, or both.

How it works

• Click Find icon by text in Slack.
• Fill in “Icon represents” and/or “Icon shows.”
• AI searches thousands of icons and returns the top matches.
• Each result includes a preview and a deep link to Figma.

Workflow demo: Find icon by image

The second workflow lets you search for icons using a screenshot.

How it works

• Upload a screenshot (drag-and-drop, paste, or file picker).
• AI compares your image to the icon library and returns the top matches.
• Each result deep-links to the exact icon in Figma.

Workflow demo: Ask a question

Some questions are about usage, sizing, or guidelines—not a specific icon. This workflow uses AI to answer natural-language icon questions.

How it works

• Ask any icon-related question in the dialog.
• Optionally include context to help the assistant interpret intent.
• AI performs multi-step reasoning and returns a consolidated answer.
• If relevant, the assistant automatically performs an icon lookup as well.
• Responses include reference links for deeper reading.

The AI data flow behind the scenes

All workflows run on the same high-level AI data pipeline.

Data flow diagram

Summary

By bringing AI-powered icon search directly into Slack, designers can now:

• find icons faster
• avoid manually searching across dozens of Figma files
• get reliable answers about icon usage
• stay focused in their existing workflow

For the Icon team, these workflows significantly reduce repetitive support tasks — freeing them to focus on higher-impact design work.