Stream Deck Icon Builder
Stream Deck by Elgato is a great tool for boosting productivity. It allows you to trigger complex actions with a single button, automate repetitive tasks, and streamline everyday work—not only in streaming, but also in programming, editing, and office workflows. A key feature of Stream Deck devices is that every button can display any icon, thanks to the built-in color display beneath the keys. This makes it possible to build a fully customized interface—whether using colorful images, simple symbols on a solid background, or just plain text.
The ability to provide your own button icons opens up the potential to design a visually appealing and cohesive interface. I’ve always looked with a bit of envy at screenshots online where users showcase their setups: carefully crafted sets of consistent icons, unified styles, and well-chosen symbols. But for me creating such an interface would take a lot of work—and investing significant effort into designing icons for a device meant to reduce effort felt somewhat counterproductive.
There are many applications available online for designing Stream Deck icons. However, most of them suffer from similar issues that discourage their use. While some allow you to save your icon collections, they are typically web-based, which makes saving them locally impractical. As a result, if you want to generate an additional button weeks or months later, you often end up starting from scratch.
Another challenge is finding the right icon to display on a button. The internet offers vast icon repositories, but using them often involves downloading files, importing icons, adjusting sizes, and positioning them—only to repeat the entire process if the icon turns out not to be suitable. Extracting application icons can also be inconvenient. Since Stream Deck is often used to launch or control apps, it’s useful to place their icons on buttons. These icons can sometimes be found online or extracted from the application itself—but that always takes time, multiplied by every icon you want to create.
A further inconvenience is the lack of proper templating mechanisms. While some editors offer templates, they usually serve only as a starting point. If you want to change the style of already designed icons in bulk, you typically have to recreate everything from scratch. Vector graphic editors can help achieve such effects, but they are not tailored for icon design, making the process time-consuming.
That’s why I decided to create an application that helps design Stream Deck icons while addressing all of the issues described above. That application is Stream Deck Icon Builder.
Let’s start with templates. In the application, you can design both buttons and templates. Unlike web-based tools, templates here are active. Let’s create a simple template.
Now, based on this template, we can create a new button. When adding a button, you need to select the template you want to use—this is important. The application will then switch the button into template mode—all its parameters will be derived from the template (marked with a gray “From template” field).
You can now modify individual fields—for example, change the icon. Simply click the pencil button to override the template value with your own.
Notice that all template parameters remain unchanged, including image effects like color fill and shadow. Now let’s say we want to update the template and all buttons that use it. We simply modify the template itself.
Returning to our button, we can see that everything has changed: background image, fill, background color, and even icon size. The only thing that remains is what we explicitly modified—the running person symbol.
If we want, we can also switch to a different template—allowing the button to inherit its properties from another source and quickly change its appearance.
The second issue my application solves is icon selection. Once you download and launch the app, you immediately gain access to the following icon sets:
- Elgato
- Feather
- Heroicons (Outline and Solid variants)
- Lucide
- Material Icons
- Remix
To make icon selection easy, there’s a built-in search engine—just type part of the icon name.
All of the above icon sets are distributed under permissive licenses (typically MIT). If you need additional sets, check the Scripts directory in the application folder. It contains scripts that automatically download, extract, and install extra icon packs. After downloading, simply restart the application to make them available in the search. The image below shows the Streamline Icons “Pixel” pack.
Note: Some packages require git to be installed.
And what if you can’t find the symbols you need—or already have your own? No problem. You can use any raster image (*.jpg, *.bmp, .png, etc.) or vector graphic (.svg).
This brings us to another feature: extracting icons from applications. Let’s say we want to create a button that launches Visual Studio. After selecting a bitmap as the icon source, you can use the “Extract” option. Simply point to any application (.exe) or DLL (.dll), and the editor will automatically extract all available icons. Then just choose one—preferably the highest resolution.
Once all icons are ready, click “Generate” and select the destination folder. Stream Deck Icon Builder will generate all icons in the chosen directory. Finally, you can save the entire project—and this is important: the project file contains everything needed to regenerate the icons at any time. For example, an icon extracted from Visual Studio is embedded within the file, so you can share it with others—they’ll be able to generate the same set or modify it as needed.
You can download the application from the Download section of my website. The free version does not allow opening, saving, or generating icons, but it lets you explore the editing workflow. If you like it, you can purchase a license in the shop – the price is $10.