A couple of years ago I needed a blog icon, realising there wasn’t a universally accepted one in existence, I created one to use for myself and threw it out into the world for anyone to use… it became far more popular than I ever expected, averaging 45,000 downloads a year!
A couple of months ago, I joked that I would look at creating an equivalent icon for websites, I actually sketched out a few ideas, but didn’t take it any further, until this weekend when I was realised I need one for my ID me at website, so I sat down to think about it a little more.
After numerous sketches and scribbled ideas based around “www”, “://” hyperlinks (even, dare I say it, a spider’s web), I eventually came back to a very simple solution and the first thing I’d drawn, a “w”
In keeping with the earliest web standards I used the web colour #0000FF (r=0 / g=0 / b=255) for the blue, plus added an underline to the “w”, both of these referring to the default way to identifying a hyperlink in standard HTML.
I’ve created a stylised “w” although I don’t see a reason why an underlined “w” in another font couldn’t work equally as well. As to colour, #0000FF makes perfect sense, but as with the blog icon, a colour more in keeping with it’s surroundings could be used.
As with the blog icon, I’m throwing this icon out there for anyone to use, tweak, do whatever they like with, totally gratis and without restriction. A mention or link back would be appreciated, but it’s not a prerequisite.
Let me know what you think and whether you’d use it, or know of anything else in use, I’ve included all original vector artwork and PNG’s with the blog icon .zip