Shipping an SVG icon is easy to treat as a file-copy step. I treat it as a short review, because a path that looks tidy in markup can still render with a hairline gap, a hard-coded fill, or a viewBox that leaves the mark off-centre at 16 pixels. The checklist I use is dull on purpose. Dull is how icons arrive looking like themselves.

I start with the box. There should be a viewBox, and there should not be a leftover page-sized width and height if the icon will be sized by CSS. I look at the crop. Extra margin on one side, or artwork clipped on another, will show up as soon as the mark sits in a row of icons that were cropped more carefully.

I look at fill and stroke. currentColor is useful when the icon must follow text colour, and a disaster when a hard-coded fill is still sitting on the path. Strokes that look even at 48 pixels can disappear or thicken oddly at 16. I check both sizes, on a light background and a dark one.

I look at names and leftover editor markup. The file should be named after its meaning. Unused groups, leftover bitmap previews, and opaque IDs from a design tool are not a style. If a use or a clipPath still needs an ID, I keep that one and I remove the rest.

I look at the metaphor, not only the nodes. Does this shape still mean the action at a small size? Do two icons that are supposed to be opposites actually read as opposites? Is the mark too busy to sit beside a short label? A technically clean file can still be the wrong picture.

I look at accessibility when the icon is more than decoration. A purely decorative mark can be hidden from assistive technology. A mark that carries meaning needs a name, in the component or in the SVG, that matches the words on the screen. I do not ship an unlabeled control because the drawing was attractive.

Only then do I call it ready. The checklist is not a design critique of the whole product. It is a way of catching the boring failures that users will feel as “the icon looks a bit off,” without ever opening a bug with that title. If the paths themselves are wrong, I go back to the source drawing. Shipping a tidy container around a bad mark is not a review. It is filing.