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I am building a web site directory that lists thousands of companies. Each company has a external company web site, and several social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I have a nice set of square icons that represent each of the social sites.

For the link to the company's web site, I have a text link that says "visit our website". That doesn't look as good as the icons though.

Is there a common or typical icon that represents a link to a company's web site?

3 Answers 3

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The standard is covered in the two "major" icon libraries.
This symbol has worked well in my testing.

Material icons

Material launch icon

FontAwesome

FontAwesome external link icons

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  • See full list of FontAwesome external link icons here: fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery&q=external. Note that for the current version as of 2019, only external-link-square-alt and external-link-alt are free. Although external-link is free in an earlier version.
    – stwr667
    Dec 11, 2019 at 12:20
  • In the current version of Material Icons, the launch icon can be found as open_in_new
    – intagli
    Feb 3 at 19:25
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Here's an SVG icon you can use inline (directly within HTML code where the icon is needed).

<svg width="24px" height="24px" viewBox="0 0 24 24" style="cursor:pointer"><g stroke-width="2.1" stroke="#666" fill="none" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"><polyline points="17 13.5 17 19.5 5 19.5 5 7.5 11 7.5"></polyline><path d="M14,4.5 L20,4.5 L20,10.5 M20,4.5 L11,13.5"></path></g></svg>

(Borrowed from Quora)

Example: example

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I don't know if an icon alone is going to be clear enough...

At GOV.UK they removed all those icons because of the following 3 reasons:

  1. You don’t always need to tell people about external links
  2. The icon is obscure and ambiguous
  3. Words are more effective

https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/28/removing-the-external-link-icon-from-gov-uk/

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  • The conversation is about developers complaining about the feature polluting the code and speculation about what might the user think about it, no solid evidence. The reasons also sound like excuses to remove the feature.
    – xpy
    Jan 15, 2020 at 10:23
  • It's true that it was originally a developer's concern, but if you read the article thoroughly you'll see that afterwards it became a design guideline not to use those icons anymore. And it's also a good example of the good collaboration between the design team and the developers.
    – huug
    Jan 15, 2020 at 14:24

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