In my job, I work with a lot of meta-data. (If you’re not sure what meta-data is, go search the web & come back; I’ll wait here…)

I’m frequently annoyed at a lack of an icon for it. Unlike technologies like RSS, HTML5, and so on, meta-data is harder to visualize and define because it means many different things in many different applications.

In WordPress, meta-data traditionally refers to our arbitrary key-value storage system for primary objects like posts, comments, users, taxonomy terms, and so on. It also refers to the team of mostly-volunteer staff that help build & maintain wordpress.org and the surrounding galaxy of sites connected to it.

Right now, WordPress’s Meta team uses the networking icon as it’s mark, which isn’t bad, but I don’ really think it’s right. It looks like this:

I was also working on a WordPress plugin for multisite blog-meta, and couldn’t find a suitable icon, so I decided to take a stab at one myself.

Of course, it’s likely a similar design exists somewhere for something else (and any similarities are accidental & coincidental) and I have a bad habit of thinking I’ve invented something only to learn someone on the web beat me to it.

I figure, it’s better to put something out into the world for scrutiny sooner, so here’s what I came up with in a pinch, and you can see it in action here:

All of the assets are up on Github, pull-requests encouraged. ❤️

P.S. Please don’t sue me if this icon is already a thing. I promise, I had no idea, and Google’s reverse image search came up empty, so maybe you should look into that instead of bothering lil’ol me.