Marek Minor is the founder and designer of Minor Adventures in Amsterdam. Over the past year he drew Cursor's complete icon set: more than 600 icons in two sizes and two styles, replacing the inherited VS Code Codicons. His article The making of Cursor's icons documents the system. These five questions go even deeper into his world.
Cursor is full of concepts with no settled visual convention: agents, tab completion, MCP, background work. How do you draw icons for a concept the industry hasn't agreed on? Which was hardest, and what did you land on?
The first step is always understanding what the thing actually is. I search for it, look at how other tools have handled it, look at image results, look at what already exists in icon libraries.
What I'm looking for is what I think of as the attractor: the soul of the object, the shape a concept keeps pulling toward. What makes a bin a bin? At what point does a question mark stop reading as a question mark? Inside that attractor there are still plenty of ways to draw the thing, but it has to land instantly. It's communication first. When the industry hasn't settled on something, there's no attractor yet, so it comes down to exploration. You try the literal version, the abstract version, and everything in between, and you put them next to each other until a few start looking better than the rest, then a couple better than those, until you choose one.
The surprising part is that none of the new concepts were the hard ones. Drawing something nobody has drawn before is the fun part because you're not making another globe or another trash can, though those are fun in their own way.
The one I enjoyed most was Bugbot. It reads as a bug, but it's also a crosshair, also a slash, and also something close to an abstract logo. The legs double as the slash. I like things that work on several levels at once, like Lil Wayne's or Jay-Z's triple entendre. You're drawing hundreds of tiny little logo-like things, and some of them end up carrying more than one meaning. When you can slip that in, it's a bonus.
156 explorations of a hamburger, that is a lot of exploration. What's the actual signal that one is finished? Did that get faster over the year, or is it 100+ every time?
I think it's intuition. Intuition is what you get when you've done something enough times that you can skip the steps and arrive at the answer directly: a well-tuned instinct doing the work in the background.
With the hamburger, I was looking at everything side by side and at some point one of them, and a few others very close to it, started feeling really right. The way the cheese melted, the way the shape closed, all the small details in the right place.
It doesn't get faster in the way you'd expect. Some icons take minutes or seconds. Others take days, or weeks of coming back to them. And you can't shortcut to the answer, sometimes you genuinely need to go through 50 or 100 versions on the canvas before you can see which one is right.
What does get faster is everything after the visual direction is locked. Once the system's rules exist, each new icon has fewer open questions.
One designer, one year, 600+ icons, for a company shipping constantly. Who at Cursor said yes or no, how often did you show work, and what did they push back on that you didn't expect? And where did they leave you with full autonomy?
Mostly I worked with Ryo, the Head of Design, and with the design team around him. Early on, during the direction explorations, more people were involved and anyone was invited to drop in with feedback. That phase was about taking the temperature: how should these icons feel, what character do they have, if they were a person what would they be wearing...? I was trying to find the place where the set sits comfortably for them, and then find the look that matches it.
The feedback was more intense at the start, when the style was still being decided, and it got lighter as the system settled. But the trust was there the whole way through, from the beginning. Cursor is a very special company and they are absolutely amazing to work with.
On showing work: I explore in my own private files. I don't like drawing while someone is watching over my shoulder, I get self-conscious and start thinking about thinking instead of just working. I need to be in the zone. But I'd take whatever I'd done that day and drop it into shared files so anyone could look. I also recorded videos every few days walking through what I'd been thinking about, so people could catch up asynchronously without a meeting.
I can't point to a push-back that surprised me, because I don't assume anything is settled. I question everything myself, including the things that feel finished, so being questioned is just part of it.
The one direction I'd have liked to take further was a version with sharp stroke caps and sharp small details, where the large curves stay round so it still reads the same from a normal distance. I was excited about it because it gave the set an edge. But it didn't solve a problem anyone had, and the response was a fairly even "yeah, that's cool" rather than any real enthusiasm, and then it went quiet. I would have had to push hard for it. Part of the job is reading what the client actually wants, so the set stayed rounded.
Autonomy was more or less total, but I'd describe it as decisions we made together. It's kind of an advisory role as well: I propose the best course I can see, and then we talk about it: what do you think, is that where you want to take the product? Everyone is doing their best to make something amazing together.
I really like the concept of going beyond the delivery. The companion site, is that custom for Cursor or is that something you deliver for each customer?
I do it for every client, unless they'd rather not have it. It turns the delivery into a proper package instead of just throwing things over the fence and be done with it. It's also just satisfying to build and to use: seeing the whole set laid out, working with it, seeing the icons in use.
More generally, I try not to arrive at a project with assumptions about what the deliverable is. I arrive with possibilities. The package gets tailored to whatever makes sense for that client and that problem.
You designed the icon set for an AI coding tool and drew every variant by hand. Did AI touch this process anywhere, and where is it plainly no help yet? And your own line, "sets drift when nobody owns them," raises the obvious question: who owns it now that you've handed it over?
It helped me think and it helped me build things. The drawing was all by hand.
If I'm stuck on a concept, I'll talk through it: what's adjacent to this idea, what metaphors sit near it, what else lives in that conceptual space. That surfaces associations I can then work with visually.
It also let me build the companion site, the migration dashboard, Figma plugins and prototypes. One I liked was a tool for prototyping the pixelated agent loaders. They're animated, so normally you'd build every state by hand. Here I could describe what I wanted and tweak it in words, which meant directing rather than assembling.
That's how I think about tools generally: I'm the conductor. The goal isn't to have AI do the work for me, and it isn't to use AI because someone says you should. The goal is to orchestrate. As a solo designer running my own studio, it gave me the ability to do things I could never have done alone, or never that fast. It doesn't give you superpowers, it extends what you can already do. It's also why I think a product like Cursor matters so much right now. Lowering the distance between having an idea and having a working thing is the biggest shift ever, and it's why we are so attached to it.
I'm building a variable icon design tool for the same reason: Figma is wonderful to work in, but it can't easily do variable icons, and what I want is to move a whole set at once rather than one icon at a time (sharper, rounder, heavier, chunkier, cheekier…) and direct the system instead of editing its singular parts manually.
What I don't do is ask a model to design the icons. I've tried, out of curiosity. In theory a lot of the individual steps are automatable. In practice you go through each exploration, rank them against each other, get the fundamentals right, then work down into the details, and those details often send you back to reconsider the whole icon. So it gets recursive.
And it isn't only about form. Every client gets something tailored, and that means semantics, culture, feeling, the specific concepts only they have. It's communication, so it's human. The good part is often the left-field idea, the thing nobody expected, dropped into the mix to make a combination that didn't exist before. That's why the conductor image sticks with me. History, art and design is an endless symphony: the same elements keep coming back, but never in the same context, so it's never the same piece twice.
On ownership: I haven't really handed it over. The project never had a clean ending. I'm still in touch with the team, still adding icons as new concepts come up, still the person watching the visual decisions.
Marek Minor runs Minor Adventures in Amsterdam. His write-up of the Cursor system is at minoradventures.co.