Chat App CSS Illustration with Gulp and Webpack

I'm wondering how other developers manage the icons in their project. For this one, I used Nucleo - I created an icon set and generated an icon font with it which worked fine for me. I've heard that it's a best practice to use icon sprites - but so far I had just trouble with this approach.

Would someone share their favorite way of handling icons and tips and advices? Any other feedback or advice is of course welcome as well.

Thanks in advance!