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AddThis updates its 16x16 icons.

I'm happy to announce that we finally released better looking 16x16 icons for our sharing tools this morning. Originally, we used the 16x16 favicons directly from our services, but we found that most of them were only optimized for a white background. I've done a quick comparison of a couple services to show you the difference.





This is a 400% magnification of our old and new 16x16 icons. The new icons are more "chicklet" styled so that they look more like buttons. They're also more consistent and visually hold together as a unit. Since the icons have to be super compressed (to load quick), I had to manually tweak most of these icons and transparency to optimize correctly when we compiled them into a sprite image. The best part is that the icons look great on black—this has been a complaint from our publishers that use a dark background.

While this is a small detail, I think that it will be a nice update to our product. I'm glad we were able to squeeze this one in for this release.

9 comments:

Ming said...

Hi Jeff,

Love the new icons, but I have one request. You probably can't do it for a variety of reasons. However, I'll ask anyways. Is there a way you guys can add a splash of color to the digg icon? Maybe, blue? As it is, the digg icon gets lost in the sea of more colorful icons.

jeffwongdesign said...

Hey Ming, thanks for pointing that out. I agree, it could use some more contrast. I'll get it updated in our next service release. Thanks for pointing it out and the suggestion. Let me know if you see anything else that needs tweaking. :)

Nicholas Cope said...

Looks much better Jeff.

jeffwongdesign said...

thanks! i'm super excited about them. we also just release a 32x32 version of addthis icons recently. check it out: http://addthis.com/gallery/addthis-icons-32x32

Anonymous said...

huh?

Jon Fukuda said...

good work J-dawg. This was totally overdue :-)

jeffwongdesign said...

thanks man... i know... thankfully it was well received!

Anonymous said...

Hi, Jeff.

Are the 16x16 icons that are in use by AddThis available for use by others? I'm trying to put together a guide to sharing services and am unfortunately unable to find a good set of icons that can be easily redistributed piecemeal.

jeffwongdesign said...

you can grab the icons by looking at all the services at http://www.addthis.com/services/all

just swap out the service in this URL:
http://cache.addthiscdn.com/icons/v1/thumbs/facebook.gif

or you can go to this link and check out more alternative icons:
http://www.addthis.com/custom-service-icons

hope this helps!

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