A cohesive and unified identity for IndieWeb protocols

While Twitter’s current owner continues to seek the spotlight, his manic stewardship of the platform has seen most peoples attention move to alternative social networks and ways of connecting with each other.

Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse have captured the imagination of developers and the media alike (if not the general public). And, as proven by David Pierce’s recent article in The Verge, the IndieWeb is part of this conversation too. Now is the moment for this movement’s decade of work to shine!

As I’m often reminded by Jeremy, at its simplest the IndieWeb is about having a website at your own domain. Great ideas don’t need logos to gain adoption. However, given its grassroots and somewhat anarchic nature, the protocols underlying the IndieWeb’s most exciting and powerful ideas lack a clear and consistent identity – if they have an identity at all.

This is not a problem complementary technologies face – communities formed around ActivityPub, RSS, JSON Feed and Microformats quickly settled on icons for their respective projects.

Current branding used by the IndieWeb

Branding and design already feature within the movement, and the seventh principle states that user experience is more important than any technical underpinnings.

IndieWebCamp has a clear and well-defined logo which has proven adaptable enough to be used for Homebrew Website Club.

IndieAuth and Webmention have icons, though undocumented, applied inconsistently and with little agreement about what colour they should be. Micropub doesn’t have an icon, although there have been discussions about what this might look like. Microsub is currently icon-less too.

Others have reached the same conclusion: that there should be a set of related icons to represent these protocols.

In 2016, Shane Becker – designer of the current IndieWebCamp logo – while considering a logo to represent the IndieWeb wrote:

Part of my thinking for this design was to build it in such a way that it could be a part of larger design system for indie web related things. Namely, I want to design logos for all of the building blocks […] and those building block logos to be able to work together in a coherent way.

In 2018, Sebastian Lasse adapted the IndieWebCamp logo to create a set of derivative icons which he then used for a series of posters about the IndieWeb.

None of these proposals to my knowledge have been developed further. There does however appear to be consensus that any icons should have a relationship to an identity used for the wider movement, and share a common design language.

Proposal

I often find myself noodling on ideas for how such logos might work. In the run up to this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in Nuremberg, I had another go.

While not by any means my final proposal, what I’m sharing here, I think, could provide a starting point for kicking off a discussion about what a cohesive identity for these protocols might look like.

This design attempts to bring together a set of icons that share the concept of a node – a line and a point – and use this to add counters to each letter shape. This serves as a nod to the original logo for IndieWebCamp designed in 2013 by Crystal Beasley, and reflects the POSSE diagram drawn by Tantek.

I’ve tried to incorporate existing ideas where available while trying to create a relationship between each icon. For example, the IndieAuth icon retains the shape of the existing icon while adjusting the counter to use the node motif, while the Webmention icon retains the top right arrow.

Colours for each icon are taken from that used on the corresponding validator sites (for example the green used on Micropub.rocks) and share a colour palette that complements that used by the IndieWebCamp logo.

Next steps

There’s a lot more to be said of these ideas and discussion to be had around them, but my train is slowly approaching Nuremberg.

I’m going to suggest a session on this topic at this weekend’s event, but regardless of whether we end up discussing it or not, I will add my thoughts to relevant pages on the wiki. Hopefully a resolution can be found there soon.

(Long time readers of this site may recognise the title of this post. In 2009 I bemoaned the lack of any common identity across UK Government and that got fixed, so…)