Refresh Icon Generator

What the refresh icon means

Re-fetch or re-run. Two curved arrows mean "sync"; one circular arrow tends to mean "reload".

Action icons label something the user is about to do, which makes ambiguity expensive: an unlabelled icon that could mean two different actions will eventually be clicked by mistake. Upload and download, cut and copy, refresh and undo are all pairs that differ by a few pixels. As an app icon this class works well because action symbols are geometrically simple — arrows, ticks and crosses survive any downscaling — but the meaning is generic, so the mark relies on colour and container for identity.

Where you will actually see it

• pull-to-refresh affordances
• sync status indicators
• app icons for backup and replication tools

Drawing the refresh at 16 pixels

The gap in the circle that makes it read as arrows rather than a ring closes quickly. Exaggerate the gap.

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 { RefreshCw } from 'lucide-vue-next'

<RefreshCw :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 actions group.