Sora App Icon: a Visual Breakdown

Two weeks ago we saw the release of the new Sora app by OpenAI. Unfortunately the app is only available in the US and Canada, and I’m in neither. Since I can’t use the app itself, I thought I’ll do a breakdown of what I can actually see - the app icon, it looks simple at first glance but it packs a lot if we can deconstruct it. I’m doing this breakdown as a fun exercise in design appreciation, I know my breakdown will probably not going to align with the authorial intent behind it. If you like this breakdown please share it, now let’s dive in.

These kinds of breakdowns are akin to exercises I used to do while earning my Master’s Degree in Visual Communications, they can be a lot of fun but they’re intended to reveal hidden truths or meanings lurking in plain sight. Seeing with our eyes is great but analyzing a visual component in a written long-form article tend to make us (or at least - make me) think a little harder, to notice the things I can feel when looking at a visual work, but don’t consciously see.

Breaking down Sora’s app icon will require some knowledge of what the Sora app is. Sora is a mix of a social video app, like TikTok, but all the content is AI generated videos, not unlike Midjourney’s Explore page.

The Sora app also has a feature called “cameo” where you can generate videos of yourself, or any other person who gave the app permission, could be your friends or could be celebrities like Michael Jackson or even OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who appears in many of Sora’s videos).

The generated videos are not more than 10 seconds long and rendered with both sound and a moving watermark, to make it harder to spread as real footage. The app itself is invite only right now, but will probably be available soon to everyone, with better and more precise rules and guardrails in place. Even though the app feels like TikTok and got a lot of comparisons to TikTok in both the traditional media and social media - its app icon is very different.

The most prominent element in the Sora icon is without a doubt the cloud in the middle. At first we can see by its shape and angle of rotation that this cloud is the same as the ChatGPT icon - OpenAI’s only app except Sora.

The reason I started by calling it a “cloud” is that it looks kind of like a cloud since it’s floating in the sky. This also can fit the AI narrative of making everything, including videos, in the cloud (in the technological sense of clouds). Generated AI images are also often compared to humans looking at the clouds and seeing things, and in that sense it would be really easy to see a cloud in this icon too. But when I tried to compare it to other clouds iconography used by tech companies, something amazing happened- I realized it’s not a cloud at all.

Notice how the other “clouds” are flat at the bottom so the cloud can actually stand upright when left alone on a desk, like a computer would. This might be an intentional aspect of cloud computing since they are computers behind the curtains, after all.

The Sora icon is different, so it’s not a cloud, it can also reference a thought bubble in the style of comics, since they have no flat part. Notice that these bubbles are for thinking, not speaking.

The thinking behind this might be that Sora generates videos in the speed of thought, any video you can think of will be done in mere minutes. The only barrier now is your own imagination, or your thought process, just like the thought bubbles in comics that can only hold so much text. Also, both comics and AI prompts use text in a very similar ”conversational” manner, so it’s only natural to use it for this icon.

At this point you might think sure I believe you it’s a thought bubble, but why does this bubble have eyes, well I’m getting to it.

First of all let’s get the obvious out of the way - the eyes make it seem like a friendly robot, signaling this AI is a friendly one. Sora’s AI is a cute little robot that just wants to help you be more creative and is capable of no harm (roll your eyes now, please).

Of course, that’s not the whole story, the eyes have little AI “sparkling” emoji, as we all know this emoji (✨) was intended to signal magical stuff but was hijacked by the AI industry to signal if anything has AI in it. Much like the AI industry highjacked all of our content and scrapped everything humans ever created- they also highjacked the icon to represent it (again, roll your eyes).

This emoji, like all original emojis, was first made by Shigetaka Kurita for SoftBank- a Japanese telecom company. Kurita itself was asked by David Amel (YouTube link) about the usage of this icon for AI features and he didn’t like it. Of course anybody can use any emoji but since its meaning was originally supposed to be something else and the literal father of emojis doesn’t like it, I’ll consider this emoji stolen because they highjacked its meaning.

To bring it back to the Sora icon itself, if we’ll look closely at the eyes we can see that it’s not eyes at all, it’s holes that we can see the background through. What can be the meaning of those “holes for eyes” face, well - first of all let’s explore the most simple answer. A face with holes for eyes is a skull, the eyes decay and we’re left with only the bones.

A skull is obviously a dead person, but it can also refer to pirates because of their flag, known as the Jolly Roger or simply as the “skull and crossbones”. Pirates can mean a few things in the software business, first and the most likely explanation here is a nod to the famous Steve Jobs quote “it’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy”.

The meaning of this quote is that it’s better to explore the unexplored than to act inline - since the discovery of the new will always happen by “pirates”. Steve Jobs apparently felt so strongly about this quote that he did decorate Apple’s offices with the Jolly Roger flag in his first run at Apple.

Of course we’re all thinking about the other explanation of a pirate flag in the software industry and that’s pirated software. Pirated software is what the software industry calls a piece of software that users share among themselves without proper licensing.

That was (and still is) a crime when people did that and some people even got sued or fined for it. But when big companies do that, like OpenAI and other AI companies it’s somehow not a crime and they get to be worth billions of dollars instead. So they do really get to be pirates.

Another popular entity with holes for eyes is the Golem. The Golem is a famous European Jewish myth about a clay creature that becomes alive when a wise rabbi does some magic to awake him. The magic this rabbi is doing is to carve a word into the Golem’s forehead, the word in this instance can be analogous to a prompt the AI needs to do its magic, to become “alive”.

Both AI and the Golem in the story are not really alive but rather have the illusion of being alive. The Jewish tale is meant to be cautionary, the Golem is becoming unstoppable and tries to upstage the rabbi, much like AI is threatening to upstage human workers in many different industries today.

If you don’t like this Jewish parable you can think of The Terminator instead, it’s also a man-made entity that, once built, we lost any control over it. The Terminator again looks like a skull and again has no eyes (only lights, much like the sparkling in Sora’s no-eyes), so it’s a good enough reference, although I prefer the Golem analogy. The Terminator is also regarded as a cautionary tale against the dangers of AI, of course.

Sora's icon is also interesting, it is a linear gradient transitioning from blue up to a very dark blue, it's brighter at the bottom and darker at the top, it also have tiny lighter pixels on it, presumably like stars in the sky.

OpenAI, I think, picked a blue background for a few reasons, first and foremost it's reminiscent of other "social" apps, much like Facebook, LinkedIn and the original Twitter app. The transitioning to the darker color is meant to signal that it's a more modern social app like TikTok, Threads and X (new Twitter) which all share a black background.

The Sora app isn't just a video generation AI model, it's a social app designed to feel much like TikTok and in that sense, they were spot on with the background colors, they signal they're a new kind of social app but with some respect, or a nod, to the past that started it all.

We aren't done yet with the background, the background also have stars in it, those stars might invoke the image of "The Starry Night" by Vincent Van Gogh (1889), which with many other classic artists, were replicated by AI to death, so now anyone could create in his iconic style.

If we'll go to a more pop culture route we can also think of Disney's famous "When You Wish Upon a Star" from the movie Pinocchio (1940), one of my favorite Disney movies.

Pinocchio also stars a wooden man-made doll that becomes alive and then gets into all kind of troubles, in that sense Pinocchio - like the Golem and Terminator, becomes a fitting metaphor for Sora and the AI industry as a whole.

At first I found it strange that the Sora icon (and it's "cloud") were on a night-time background but as I started to understand the symbolism I was reminded of the hit show Game of Thrones most famous phrases: "For the night is dark and full of terrors".

This breakdown was done without experiencing the app itself (because of my region), so all I know is by the cultural impact it made on the internet: articles, podcasts, YouTube videos etc.

Take it with a grain of salt and I hope some of what I wrote did resonate with you after all, if it did please let me know. AI as a whole was a very interesting development in the tech landscape and as I saw many people for and against the technology I only left hoping that Sora has enough guardrails in place and that they will never change their fabulous icon.

I did saw many Sora videos in a few social networks and many people screaming against Sora or video generation as a whole, but I never saw anyone doing a deep dive on their icon like I did here, so hopefully it can serve as another way we can talk about these apps that is more academic and level-headed.

Oh, and Sora is the name of the main character in the game Kingdom Hearts (2002) that yields a giant key, keys usually open doors, maybe the door to the future? to unite the past of early 2000s with the future of AI? Do with that what you will.

Goodbye.