Recently, I opened up AI Studio and saw a familiar icon in the upper left corner: the menu_open icon, which typically indicates that the navigation drawer or rail is expanded on screen.
Seeing the icon there took me back to when Miche Alvarez, Yasmine Evjen and I were hanging out in Google’s New York office around my desk and came up with the icon. Somewhere, Yasmine swears she has the original post-it note Miche sketched the icon on.
But the story of the menu_open icon was a reminder to me of the ways that designers can subtly influence products through little decisions. How answering a tiny question can have ripple effects, years later.
I think it was in early 2019 that we first submitted the menu_open icon to the Material Icons repository. I had been working on guidelines assets for the navigation rail within one of the Material vignettes at the same time that Yasmine and I were sketching designs for a text-editing app, both using the hamburger icon to expand and collapse a menu.
Miche, seeing my monitor, commented how the icon never really felt complete. After all, it didn't change to communicate the state of the navigation menu. Soon the idea was on a sticky note and I was opening Illustrator to put it on the pixel grid. We uploaded all the icon's variations to the repository and there it sat for a long while.
It slowly started to make appearances in more guidelines assets, and eventually became encoded in the system through the navigation rail in 2024's Expressive component updates.
From there, major products like AI Studio integrated the icon. A small doodle years ago, which we decided to just go ahead and submit—no complex reviews or approval processes—ended up having an impact on the navigation components billions of people are using.
