How do other Indie Hackers - Create Icons for their side projects?

just use the simplest emojis as the icons

I used Inkscape to design my SVG logo. It's pretty powerful and has a steep learning curve like all design software, but there are also plenty of tutorials for doing simple tasks. I started really basic and then iterated on the design incrementally in inkscape. For other icons, I just use freely available ones like those from font awesome.

I use this tool called Vectr (www.vectr.com)

I'm a programmer, and not a designer by any means.

It runs in the browser, so no need to download anything.

IMO, it's good enough for creating simple icons. The biggest plus is that it's got an extremely simple interface. And you can import your svg and png images, and export to the same formats.

Edit: It's free to use as well!

I bought a lifetime subscription to Nucleo a while ago. I use that for basically every project.

Thanks for feedback all, really helpful

Figma + Logo Creator or Iconify

Heroicons by the Tailwind peeps

I use icons from https://thenounproject.com/ as a starting point and modify/build in either Adobe Illustrator or XD

Figma works pretty great for me.

The quickest way is to find a good icon set that has a lot of options and use that. You can find tons of great icon sets with a little googling. My favorite free set is Feather. My favorite paid set at the moment is Picons and I use that for 90% of my product design projects. I've also been tempted to pull the trigger on buying Streamline for a while.

Though if you're trying to get a product into the hands of users as quickly as possible, have you considered no icons for right now? Designing without icons forces you to get very clear about the microcopy you use in your navigation and on buttons/links. There's some cases where an icon increases usability (like "Create account" vs "Create account +") but often icons are added just for aesthetics.

What kind of icons are you looking for? You can find a lot for free at https://fontawesome.com/.

I used sketch and created something very basic. I think you could use a trial and export to an SVG.