Icons
Icons help decorate and visually communicate actions as an alternative to text. They are best used for repeated or persistent actions when that action can be easily recognized with an image.

Icon Library

The GDS icon library is a first pass at consolidating all of the icons used across Nielsen products. This library will grow over time to include more icons from Global Panel, Gracenote, and other Nielsen icons we haven’t yet included. If you need an icon that currently isn’t found in our library, please contact us so we can get it included in our backlog.

We have plans in our roadmap to update this page to be a resource to search for and copy code for icons. Check back often to see our progress towards that end.

Using Icons in Figma

If you’d like to use an icon in your designs there are 2 components to choose between. If an icon has any interaction, use the action-icon component. If the icon is only for display, use the display-icon component. After you add the component to your file, update the icon file inside of the component to whatever icon you'd like.

Using these components will ensure our icons have a proper size that aligns to our tokens. In the display-icon component, there is an option with a background if that works best in your design.We have preset color combinations for every color (most commonly a foreground color of [color]-600 and background of [color]-100) in both light mode and dark mode, which are available directly in MAF.

Please reach out to the GDS team if you have any questions about which icons are most commonly used in different scenarios.

Using Marketing Pictograms

Nielsen's marketing team has created a set of (2000+!) icons for the company. These icons are created to reflect the current branding. They’re graphics that have specific usages to communicate a variety of ideas. In GDS, to avoid confusion, we call these icons pictograms to denote they represent a word or idea.

Pictograms should never be used as an alternative to the interface icons. On occasion, they can be used as a decorative, ornamental element in a design. Please reach out to the marketing team if you have any questions about how, when, or which icons should be used to align to their messaging.