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You know a concept has merit when it's picked up by Google. Google have adopted the Open Share Icon (OSI), the product of a creative partnership that I'm proud to have played a part in. This is something to celebrate: you don't need highly paid professionals or deep pockets to pull off a good idea: you just need plain-old enthusiasm and an unmet need. Here is the story of how the Open Share Icon (OSI) came to be.

The Google toolbar—now with OSI

A proposal

On 20 March 2008 I read that Shareaholic had been threatened by ShareThis.com over the use of the Share Icon in their functionally similar Firefox extension. After discussing this with David Hall and Icerabbit we agreed that next day I would write to Jay Meattle, entrepreneur at Shareaholic, to seek confirmation this was so—and to float the idea of his involvement in an alternative icon project. Having recently proposed and completed the design of the Geotag Icon we were game to be involved ourselves:

If you needed assistance with the vector graphics, moral or other practical support, I know of at least a couple of volunteers ;-)

Iteration after iteration

Things moved quickly: we didn't wait for a response. David, Icerabbit and I exchanged an enormous number of design candidates within the space of a few days. Most of our designs involved hands:

Our final selection came down to stylised "seeing hands", which we described in the design note I sent to Jay on 24 March as follows:

We just couldn't help ourselves and came up with several ideas for an alternative icon. David Hall, Icerabbit, and myself are proud to present for your scrutiny the following suggestion (two variations):

Personally, I love the concepts it embodies. Of course we have the overall visual homogeneity with the other "standard" icons, the green which is already associated with a share icon, and iconography for both "pass it on" (one cupped hand delivering an object into another) and at the same time "look at this" (the centre elements also look like an eye). It is stylised but then so are the other icons, and our experiments proved that simple works best. We're really excited by it and hope you are too. However, it's only one idea and you or other interested parties may have others. Show it to co-workers, friends, and see if people like it.

And like it they did. Jay was on board and keen to drive the project forward, and it was he who named the design Open Share Icon. This design said "sharing" a lot more effectively to me than the "network node" symbolism of the ShareThis.com icon (itself very similar to the RDF icon):

There were numerous subsequent refinements (contrast, gradients, shades of green, spacing etc) reflecting the input of the wider community, but we had the elemental design nailed down in just four days! The four of us debated minutiae and David Hall coordinated our input, delivering the final bitmapped renderings while Jay produced the vector equivalents.

The OSI did struggle a bit at small sizes, and subsequently Kaspars Dambis stepped up to fix that with a modified rendering designed to reduce better:

Refining the case for a new icon

It wasn't just the design that needed refining. The case for creating an alternative icon was a solid one, and originally went like this (the table has since been pruned):

Project oversight, promotion and advocacy

Having had a hand in refining the final design and getting his own hands dirty with virtual green paint, Jay stepped up to the more difficult challenge of getting the OSI noticed. We all felt that the icon should have its own promotional website as per the other "web standard" icons. A temporary Google-hosted project homepage was set up on 25 March 2008 (as noted on this blog) and fulfilled several important functions. Chief among these was a forum for the wider sharing community to exchange ideas about the direction of the project. In May 2009 a substantive site went live at openshareicons.com. The OSI was now fully part of the family:

A nod to early adopters

One of the earliest (April 2008) adopters was Share from iBegin, available as a standalone script or WordPress plug-in:

Shareaholic began using the OSI in May 2008, and Add To Any began using the OSI in November 2008.

Since this time the OSI has found its way into many websites and services large and small. As far as I know the first use of the OSI motif in an iPhone app was Gaggle, a social web browser, which I became aware of in June 2009:

It is a direct result of Jay's personal evangelism and a credit to his ongoing enthusiasm that Google could be coaxed to adopt the OSI.

Two more icon projects

The Geotag Icon Project is another design initiative I have been involved with: David Hall, Icerabbit and myself formed the core design team, considering and refining suggestions from the wider online community. We three also worked on the Geotag application icon with Andreas Schneider.

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