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Internet Archive elements

Icons

The icons that ship are in icons/, imported one at a time from @internetarchive/elements/icons/<name> or drawn with <ia-icon>. Browse them, with their import lines, in the icon gallery on the Components tab.

This page is the system's guidance for them: sizes, color, media-type accents, the webfont glyphs still in use, and proposed additions. The set below is the one the style guide lifted from archive.org's inline SVG, shape geometry only, so every glyph inherits currentColor. Most of it is already in icons/ under its own name; a glyph here that isn't is a candidate to add.

Lifted from archive.org

Each card shows the slug you call it by, where the geometry came from, the name the site gives it, and the sizes it renders at live.

Sizes

Five steps on a 4px grid. Icons are square; the source viewBoxes vary (0 0 40 40 for the topnav, 0 0 100 100 for the tiles, 0 0 300 300 for media types) and all normalize to these.

Color

Every icon is drawn with currentColor, so it takes the text color of whatever it sits in and re-points inside .ia-inverse without being told to. Live colors many glyphs through the CSS fill property instead — #999 in the topnav's media menu, #333 for a tile's counters beside #2c2c2c numbers — and none of that carries over.

Media-type accents

The one exception. An item tile's media-type glyph takes its type's accent, from the tile component's own color map. Live's hues are kept; the six that fall below 3:1 on the white card are darkened just far enough to reach it (D-43), because the glyph's shape is what tells a text from a film.

Icons drawn with a webfont

Some icons are Iconochive glyphs rather than SVG. Glyph outlines in a font cannot be lifted as path data, so these are recorded as usage only. They are also the reason the set has gaps: a flag, a plus-circle and a share arrow exist on the site, but only as characters in a font.

An icon font renders as text. It disappears under forced-colors, it is replaced by user font-override stylesheets and by some content blockers, and it blocks on a font download. New work uses the SVG set — see foundations/iconography.md.

Proposed additions

Affordances the system needs that archive.org has no usable SVG for, drawn to match the set and marked so nobody mistakes them for lifted geometry.