A milkshake icon is certainly easier to draw than a Daniel Day-Lewis icon.
Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
91–100 of 166 posts
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#92Translating 'share' into chinese yields this nice character: 共 It's unique and memorable after you learn it. Not like the million other arrows we have in icons.
I don't know Kanji, but aparently in Japanese: "Affixing 共 to other people is disrespectful compared to 達 (たち, -tachi)."
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#93The problem that comes before this one is whether share is a well-understood action. If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control. If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat…
I think "send" vs. "share" is a good point. Email/SMS/DM/IM all have a recipient - they're messages that are sent. A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared . Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users. I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the righ…
I've been noticing that many android apps use the 'paper airplane' icon for 'send email' or 'send message' as opposed to sharing.
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#94What is amazing to me is that when I ctrf-f for 'publish' on this page I get not a single hit (in tfa or these comments).
A huge part of what 'sharing' is today is actually publishing albeit to a controlled group of people. Often on social sites sharing is in fact publishing in the classic sense since many posts are public.
I wonder whether this is a branding thing. 'Sharing' seems to be a more intimate and special or exclusive one-one activity (think secrets), while 'publishing' seems to be a far more public one-many activity. Strange then that so many companies try to use 'share' to cover many to one. I guess you can 'share' a story around a campfire, but again, you probably know everyone you are sharing with.
Given the association of sharing with familiarity I think it is quite devious of companies to use such a term to describe an activity which is actually publishing.
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#95http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_icon The Android share icon has been around since (at least?) 2006 and was used a lot on websites, particularly Wordpress-based sites. It was initially open source but then sold Share This and trademarked. Most services use the icon shape without ST's green button background.
The thing about open source is that the way it is licensed means that anyone who has acquired the license before it is sold (such as Google's Android) can redistribute it as long as it follows the license requirements. As such, ANYONE can still use the Google's version of the three dots or if anyone had acquired a license to the original before it was no longer offered (pre 2012), can also relicense the work. Can any of the other share symbols be freely used?
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#96This article reminds me of conversations that we had at Vimeo when redesigning our video player. Our previous share icon was two arrows facing diagonally in opposite directions. The main problem with that was that it was very close to our "embed" icon. We knew we wanted to change it, but we didn't know what icon to use. We had a bunch of mockups that included some of the icons found in this article. Ultimately, we en…
I don't think I've used it, but it would have never occurred to me that the paper plane icon did anything other than send an email. Of course I'm one of those weirdos that just copies a URL when I want to share something.
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#97Maybe it's the word "share" that needs changing instead.
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#98What do people think of an "Outgoing Speech Bubble" icon? Here's a quick mockup I just did:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9f0w2tsrbc3c55/arrowbubble.png
and at 32px wide:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qe6t169zgobdwih/arrowbubble-small....
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#99Apple gets this spot on by having an icon represent the action actually being performed, i.e., sending some information somewhere. That could be to yourself (a bookmark) to another person, a group of people, or the public at large. It doesn't really matter. Many of the others are trying to represent the abstract concept of "sharing", which doesn't fit the use case at all. That's why those icons don't make any sense.…
My favourite is the icon of multiple people. That, to me, obviously signifies social which is what sharing is. You don't need an arrow in this case, just put a group of stick figures in the icon and it makes perfect sense.
Android's approach used to be very acceptable - a directed graph - but then they got rid of the arrows for some reason.
In the context of OS X I never understood what the button was because I never have any need to share something from within my OS. In fact I removed the button from my toolbar. I'm not sure it's that obvious if you didn't have the icon text.
In fact it's inconsistent even within OS X. The Public folder icon is a person on a street sign.
Re: Share: The Icon No One Agrees On
#100This is particularly interesting article because they have the answer to the question on the bottom of the page: http://i.imgur.com/0NdMB4S.png The share icons are Facebook, Twitter and Google+ logos. The share icon that nobody agrees to is actually just the icon that is going to reveal the interface of the actual share icons. I think that users don't want to share, they want to post on facebook, tweet or do the thin…
I agree, my Facebook, Twitter, and email audiences are all different groups of people. When I see something I want to show people, I think "I should put this on Facebook" or "I should Tweet this".
Actually, I never use "share" buttons, I just go onto the service I want to use and link to it manually. I guess I don't share often enough, and I want total control over the message I post.