Share: The Icon No One Agrees On

The larger question: All platforms seem to eventually converge on icons to some extent. What I see here is that the concept of sharing is new, and I don't think that's limited to computer uses. We live in a very competitive world where we consume, buy, compete. Sure we share things, but we discriminate in the physical world. I think the notion of sharing non discriminately with ALL our connections is fundamentally new and this is contributing to the lack of a standard symbol.

That's what Windows desktop called it for a long time. See http://media.askvg.com/articles/images3/Send_To_Menu.png

Apple 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. Others are representing specific technical concepts like graphs that again, only make sense for certain specific uses and aren't especially intuitive.

In many ways, it makes sense to outsource this kind of design to someone that doesn't speak any English and run the brief through a translator. That way you're forced to explain the concept that the icon needs to represent, instead of having the icon represent the English word that happens to be (perhaps wrongly) attached to the concept.

Distilling the concept down to an arrow pointing outwards to represent sending something is the kind of minimalist, universally intuitive design that Apple are often brilliant at. Approaching the design task like an engineering task is likely to lead to this as the optimal solution. I find it endlessly interesting that good designers tend to do this intuitively, in spite of not thinking anything like Engineers, whereas Engineers tend to do the opposite if forced to do design.

If you e-mail a document then you make a copy of it at that instant, but if you send a link then it is updated as the original is updated and the copy is made not when it's sent but when it's received, which I'd consider to be two very different things.

"Sharing" with a group of people like in Facebook (where each one can essentially change the nature of the thing in real time by commenting on it or liking it) is also somewhat distinct from the other two because it makes a send-time copy that can be changed (in limited ways) by people other than you in possibly unpredictable ways.

I really prefer the "many people" icon, and disagree that it should only mean collaboration. I think it has the least abstract form and most intuitive meaning.