The hamburger icon has now become an instantly recognisable feature when browsing the web - it has become widely adopted by web developers and UX/UI designers and is a staple fixture of a large number of websites.
For many, it may seem like the hamburger icon has just simply existed since the birth of the World Wide Web, but that's not the case. Software designer Geoff Alday recently set out to discover who. In a blog post on Evernote, he described what he discovered.
It turns out that the burger icon actually comes from the Xerox "Star" personal workstation, one of the earliest graphical user interfaces. Its designer, Norm Cox, was responsible for the system's interface, including the icons that would effectively communicate functionality to the earliest computer users. The hamburger, which was designed to look like a list of items, seemed like a good way to remind users of a menu list.
Alday contacted Cox and got the following response:
"I designed that symbol many years ago as a "container" for contextual menu choices. It would be somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button.
Its graphic design was meant to be very "road sign" simple, functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. With so few pixels to work with, it had to be very distinct, yet simple. I think we only had 16x16 pixels to render the image. (or possibly 13x13... can't remember exactly).
Interesting inside joke... we used to tell potential users that the image was an "air vent" to keep the window cool. It usually got a chuckle, and made the mark much more memorable.
It's been nice to see that so many of our designs from those early pioneering years have stood the test of time and become ubiquitous symbols in our UI’s."
Today, the icon is used in many types of user interface, most commonly on websites to replace navigations on smaller devices such as smartphones and tablets.