AI sparkle icon ✨

How to read it

The Nielsen Norman Group, a user-experience research firm, wrote in 2024 that with no standard way to show a “mysterious AI-driven process”, the sparkles icon had become the de facto symbol for everything AI. Fast Company listed where it had spread by February 2024: a pair of blue sparkles for Zoom’s meeting summaries and email replies, a single blue sparkle on Google’s Gemini chatbot, and sparkles beside the buttons in Adobe Photoshop that generate pictures and remove unwanted objects. Zoom’s lead product designer, Madison Holbrook, told the magazine it chose the icon because it “carries a sense of wonder and delight”. The icon is drawn from the emoji ✨, which Unicode encodes as U+2728 SPARKLES, added in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010.

Also searched as: ✨ AI icon, AI stars icon, sparkle icon.

How the sparkle came to mean AI

Fast Company points to older uses of sparkles for automatic functions, such as the Magic Wand tool Adobe Photoshop has offered for decades, drawn with sparkles on its end. It also points to Twitter. Dan Saffer, a designer there, told the magazine the team chose sparkles for the button that switched between the algorithmic and the chronological timeline, because the star was already taken and a robot was too literal. Fast Company dates that button to 2019; TechCrunch reported the “sparkle button” rolling out to all iOS users on 18 December 2018. By the end of 2024 The Globe and Mail counted Google, Microsoft, Spotify, Samsung, Slack, LinkedIn and ChatGPT among the companies using a four-pointed star for AI features.

What people think it means

In the Nielsen Norman Group’s qualitative and quantitative research, published in September 2024, not one participant mentioned AI when shown a sparkles icon, in an app or on its own. Of 107 answers about what it would do, the most common were favourite or save an item (about 17%) and visual effects or optimisation (also about 17%). The same research found apps using sparkles for other things: Lyft for promotions and the Plane Finder app for a What’s New feature. On Medium, Fast Company noted, it marks a premium membership. Saffer’s worry, in the same article, is that the sparkle leads to a different action on each service.

The emoji before AI

The Nielsen Norman Group quotes Dictionary.com’s list of the ✨ emoji’s uses: stars in the sky, excitement and admiration, love and congratulations, magic and cleanliness. The group thinks the icon began in image- and video-editing software as a sign of special effects.

Look-alikes

A plain star ⭐ usually means favourite or save: 73% of people in the Nielsen Norman Group’s study read it that way, and the group notes that some sparkle designs look very like it. Unicode has single four-pointed stars too, ✦ and ✧ (U+2726 and U+2727), next to ✨ in its Dingbats block. The AI icon, the letters AI in a circle or badge, labels content that AI has made or changed; the sparkle marks a feature that uses AI. Some companies pair the sparkle with a second picture, as Gmail’s Help Me Write icon does with a pen.