The Problem:
When building out an icon system in Adobe Libraries, you need to save a separate icon for each color variation, style variation (we have a filled style, line style, and multi-color style), and color space (digital vs. print). For our organization, there are 3 styles, 3 color variations for each, and 2 color spaces, meaning you need 18 different versions of a single icon. For large icon libraries, this results in a massive library and poor performance (icons with too many assets start to slow down and cause crashes).

My Idea for a Solution:
Allow users to create specified color, style and color space variations for any library asset. In short, you could establish what colors are allowed for an asset that users could pick from and then drag into their projects.

In our organization's example, we could pick a digital color space, select an icon from the line style, and then choose from an approved set of colors to drag into a project.

From an interface perspective, we'd need to be mindful that users are likely going to be using a lot of icons in a single document, so having to make all of these selections for each icon would be cumbersome. Perhaps using filters to show all of the icons in a particular color space, style and color would be a shortcut so you could show the whole library in a consistent way at once.

Another possible variable to introduce would be a safety space around an graphic asset like an icon. Right now, we're building in a non-filled, non-stroked box to add some space around our icons to help with consistent alignment and scale. This isn't handled consistently across Adobe products. Illustrator honors and includes that box, but InDesign ignores it. That's problematic when Libraries aren't consistent across programs.

I know this type of thing also comes into play for brand identities with different logo color options, configurations, and color spaces, so this would affect a large percentage of users who rely on Adobe Libraries.