I spent $300 on a premium icon library and it slowed down our whole project instead of speeding it up

Bought a big icon set from a well-known vendor for a dashboard redesign thinking it would save weeks of custom work, but the inconsistency in stroke widths and missing key symbols like 'export' and 'filter' made me spend more time patching than just making them from scratch in Illustrator. The team ended up overriding half the icons anyway, so that $300 basically bought us a lesson in what not to do. Has anyone else dropped real cash on a design asset that actually made things worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant.kevin13d ago

Bought a premium arrow set once and ended up redrawing half of them because the angles were all over the place. The worst part was discovering they had 30 different arrow variants but somehow missed the one I actually needed for a basic dropdown. That money would have been better spent on a couple hours of freelance work from someone who actually gets ui patterns. Sometimes you just gotta accept that pre-made stuff is made for the average case and your project is never the average case lol.

the_aaron12d ago

Right? "30 different arrow variants but somehow missed the one I actually needed" - that hurt to read because I've been there. It's like they put in all that work and still managed to not solve the actual problem.