Hourglass Icon Generator

What the hourglass icon means

Waiting, or a process that takes time. Reads as "in progress" more clearly than a clock does.

Time icons split into two families that users read differently: a clock face means a moment or a timestamp, while an hourglass or a spinner means elapsed or ongoing duration. Mixing them creates subtle confusion in progress indicators. Their common problem is interior detail — hands, date grids, rings and buttons all sit inside a bounding shape and merge together under downscaling. The rule is to keep the outer silhouette strong and delete interior detail aggressively.

Where you will actually see it

• loading and processing states
• queue position indicators
• app icons for scheduling and waiting-room products

Drawing the hourglass at 16 pixels

The narrow waist where the two bulbs meet is the whole shape. If the waist closes, the icon becomes a bowtie.

Stroke weight is the control that matters most here. Lucide icons are drawn on a 24 × 24 grid with a 2px stroke, which means that when the icon is scaled down to 16px the stroke is effectively 1.33px — below one device pixel on a standard-density display. Raising the stroke to 2.5 or 3 before exporting keeps the shape solid; lowering it to 1.5 suits large app icons where a heavy stroke looks clumsy. The editor exposes this as a slider, so you can find the value that survives your smallest target size rather than guessing.

Using it in code

If you want the icon in a Vue project rather than as a downloaded asset, it is a named export of the lucide package:

import { Hourglass } from 'lucide-vue-next'

<Hourglass :size="24" :stroke-width="2" />

The download button above gives you something different: the icon composed onto a background with a corner radius, exported as a flat SVG path set. The exporter converts the icon out of its <foreignObject> wrapper first, because a foreign object taints an HTML canvas and would otherwise break PNG and ICO rasterisation.

Related icons

Other icons in the time group.