Changelog

All notable changes to the icons8 plugin are documented here. Format: Keep a Changelog; versioning: SemVer. The plugin version lives in four manifests that have to agree: plugin.json, .claude-plugin/plugin.json, .codex-plugin/plugin.json and .cursor-plugin/plugin.json.

[0.6.0] — 2026-10-15

A tenth skill: illustration-animator turns static SVG illustrations into looped animations.

Added

• illustration-animator. Given a folder of SVG illustrations of one style, the skill writes a short story for each one, cuts the drawing into moving parts with joints and tight line masks (characters fused into one outline are cut and bent with a pinned seam), and builds a looped Lottie JSON and an MP4 without background, plus GIF and MOV. It checks every animation with scripts and a visual judge and fixes what it finds, within hard time limits per illustration. A scene the user calls bad becomes a rule for the whole style. The rules and the reference scenes were trained on Icons8 animations and illustrations. It runs a Node engine from its own folder and does not use the MCP server. Its one-time setup lists what it would install (pinned npm packages from a lockfile, a pinned Chrome checked by SHA-256) and installs nothing until the user agrees; ffmpeg it only names, the user installs it; the lessons, bans and samples it collects stay in the user's project, never in the plugin folder.

[0.5.2] — 2026-10-05

A Cursor marketplace can now list the plugin, and Cursor installs it from there with its skills and the Icons8 server.

Added

• A Cursor manifest. .cursor-plugin/plugin.json names the plugin, its display name, version, author, license and keywords, and gives the listing the Icons8 logo. Cursor finds the nine skills in skills/ and the Icons8 server in the two server files without extra configuration.

• A Cursor marketplace. .cursor-plugin/marketplace.json lists the plugin from the repository root, so a team can import this repository as a marketplace in Cursor.

• Install steps for GitHub Copilot CLI. The README shows how to add this repository as a marketplace in Copilot CLI and install the plugin from it. Copilot CLI reads the existing Claude marketplace file, so no new file was needed.

Fixed

• measure.py runs after a bare-skill install in Claude Code. The ouch skill located the script through ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}, which Claude Code fills in only for a plugin, so a bare skill could not run the command. The skill now uses ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}, which Claude Code fills in for a plugin and a bare skill alike. Cursor, Codex and GitHub Copilot fill in neither variable, and the skill now tells them to replace it with the folder that holds the skill instead of leaving the path to a guess. Windows uses the same path, so the separate PowerShell and cmd lines are gone.

[0.5.1] — 2026-10-01

The plugin is ready for Anthropic's plugin directory. The Icons8 server is now declared with the http type, the one that claude.ai chat and Cowork load, as well as Claude Code.

Added

• A listing for the Claude directory. .claude-plugin/plugin.json carries a display name, the Icons8 logo as its icon, and links to the privacy policy, the terms and conditions, the contact page for support and the README as documentation. Without the icon the directory would show the publisher's GitHub avatar.

• The README says what the plugin connects to. A new section lists every host the skills reach, what each request carries, what the skills write into a project, and what runs on the user's machine. The README also gains example prompts and a support section.

Changed

• .mcp.json is a regular file with "type": "http". Since 0.2.0 it was a symlink to mcp.json. The directory refuses a symlink where the plugin loader reads, and it accepts a remote server only as http, sse or ws. Chat and Cowork load only http and sse, so they skipped the server that Claude Code accepted under the streamable-http alias. mcp.json stays as it was, in the Agent Plugins v1 format that Codex and v1 clients read. The server is now declared in two files, one per format, and CI fails if the two URLs differ.

• The Claude manifest no longer names an MCP file. Claude Code loads .mcp.json by itself and then loads whatever mcpServers names on top of it. Pointing mcpServers at mcp.json would replace the http entry with the streamable-http one again.

• measure.py takes --chrome PATH instead of $CHROME. The script now reads no environment variables. It looks for Chrome and Edge in their standard install locations, on Windows C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86) and the user's AppData\Local, and then on PATH. A browser installed anywhere else is named with --chrome. The Claude directory holds for manual review every version of a plugin that reads environment variables and also sends data to a server, and that hold would stop automatic publishing.

[0.5.0] — 2026-09-30

Icons that move, without an interface that flickers.

Added

• Animated icons in icons8. The server now finds icons that move (search_icons(animated=True)) and serves them as Lottie, gif or apng (get_icon_animation). The skill's rule is that motion answers the user and never starts on its own: an icon plays one cycle on a click that changes state or on a mouse hover over a standalone element, half a cycle each way on a toggle, or for as long as a loading process runs, then stops on its rest frame. Navigation, lists, empty and error states stay static, and nothing loops on hover or click. Hover and click take Lottie only, because gif and apng loop forever by construction, cannot be recolored and exist in one size per pack; gif is also opaque white. references/ANIMATION.md carries the formats, a play-once snippet run in Chrome, CSS tinting that follows the icon's color, and two new lock fields (motion, format). The motion also has to say what the action says: positive actions take motion that fills or joins, negative ones motion that empties or breaks, checked by the Lottie's layer names and by looking at frames. Found in a test build where the only animated link in m_outlined breaks apart, which suits Unlink and contradicts Copy link. Toggles (like, bookmark) play half a cycle on and half off, reverse from wherever they are on a quick second click, and load in the right state. Keyboard focus never starts motion. The loader loops only between start and stop. Each Lottie is fetched once and saved to the file the lock names, so later screens do not pay for it again. The icon keeps the animator's timing; motion now says its durations do not apply to authored animation inside Icons8 assets.
• The main search loop passes animated=False, so animated variants stay out of static screens.

Changed

• icons8 no longer says the MCP has no animated icons.
• motion names an animated icon played once as the alternative to cross-fading paired variants.

[0.4.1] — 2026-09-24

The ouch frontmatter was not valid YAML. A tool that parses frontmatter strictly skipped the skill.

Fixed

• ouch loads in every tool that reads skill frontmatter as strict YAML. Since 0.4.0 its description contained (video and Lottie): use it. A colon followed by a space is not allowed in an unquoted YAML value. A strict parser rejects the frontmatter, and the tool drops the skill without an error in the agent. One confirmed case is the skills installer from npm: it printed YAML parse error and listed eight skills instead of nine. Claude Code reads frontmatter less strictly and still showed the skill. The sentence now ends with a full stop, and the description text is otherwise the same. CI now rejects : and # in an unquoted name or description, so the same mistake fails the build.

[0.4.0] — 2026-09-22

The plugin stops at fetching assets and starts checking what the agent did with them: seven new skills. Plus Ouch illustrations that move, and one lock file for the whole project instead of two.

Added

• A design pass over the finished screen, seven skills. asset-check runs on its own once a UI is built or changed and answers four mechanical questions: is an emoji standing in for an icon, is there a section that should carry a picture and carries none, is an image URL dead, does an icon import name still exist in the library. That last check works on projects that use no Icons8 asset at all.

  Five more go deeper, one territory each: ux-check (behaviour, the six states, flows, and the accessibility floor of semantics, keyboard reach, labels and alt text), ux-writing (every string a user reads), ui-polish (alignment, radii, icons, contrast, focus and state styling), motion (whether a thing should animate at all, then every timing value) and design-tokens (bootstrap a token system, then catch drift in counts rather than in adjectives). icons8-design is the front door that routes a request to the one that owns it.

  Two properties keep them from becoming noise. Every rule that two skills could raise has exactly one named owner, so one defect yields one finding. And when several run on the same screen the reports merge into a single table with a single verdict, instead of five stacked lists nobody reads. Where a finding is about an icon or an illustration, the fix arrives already in place, taken from the catalogue.

  icons8 and ouch do not reference any of this: asking for an icon stays a one-skill job.

• Animated illustrations in ouch — the skill now handles artwork that has motion, not just stills: when a slot earns movement it finds the animated versions, ships the formats in the order that actually plays (the mp4-hevc source goes first, because Safari answers "probably" to webm too, takes whichever it sees first and then cannot show the transparency), and falls back to the still when motion is not wanted. The preview links that come back from search are watermarked and 368 px wide; they are for choosing, never for shipping. The rules live in skills/ouch/references/ANIMATION.md, with the budget, the playback and the layout math.

Changed

• One lock file per project. icons8.json now holds everything the next screen needs to match this one: the icon pack, the sizes the project actually uses, the illustration style with its slots, and the names of the CSS variables assets should be wired to. Illustrations used to live in a separate ouch.json, which meant two files, two sources of truth and an agent that read one and forgot the other.

  Nothing breaks. A lock in the old shape is read as before, a separate ouch.json is picked up and folded in on the next write, and neither file is deleted: the skills say the old one is superseded and leave it on disk for you to remove.

• Third-party notices. Parts of two design skills are derived from MIT-licensed material and stay under their authors' copyright. THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md carries the full permission notices (Emil Kowalski, Jakub Krehel) and the links that the adapted CC BY 4.0 and Open Government Licence sources require. The repository itself stays Apache-2.0.

• icons8 says what to do when nobody is watching. Two steps assumed a human at the other end: opening the contact sheet, and waiting for a prototype to be approved before fetching SVG. In a subagent or a batch run there is nobody to open the sheet for and nobody to approve anything, so the skill now reads the sheet itself and names the picks it was unsure about, and treats "approved" as "the set that survived to the end of the layout" instead of shipping PNG where the project wants vectors.

Earlier releases

Release notes for 0.1.0 to 0.3.0 are on GitHub Releases.