The icon that appears when an image is not loading – a piece of paper with a circle, a triangle and a square – was first used in 1994 in the Beta version of the Netscape Browser. Since then, other browsers have borrowed its design adding minor alterations, usually broken or torn. Other icons were also tested, such as Safari’s interrogation mark or the bucolic landscape of Google Chrome, but as far as iconography goes it becomes crystal clear: something is not there, it is broken, or is not fixed.
These representations of lost images online have stimulated Paulo Mendel to develop www.brokenpage.com, a website that generates drawings in web art that can be saved and printed on tracing paper.
