Share turns your design into a link. Anyone who follows it sees a picture of the design and, if you allow it, can open their own copy in Studio Notan and change it. Nothing they do ever touches yours.
What it does
The ‘Share’ button in the title bar opens a dialog, ‘Share your notan’. Under ‘People with the link can’ are two choices:
- Edit a copy: the link opens a copy of the design in Studio Notan, theirs to change. The picture and the design are both uploaded.
- Only view: the link shows a picture of the design, with a ‘Make your own’ link into Studio Notan. Only the picture is uploaded; the design itself never leaves your browser.
The dialog shows the picture the link will carry: a card 1200 × 630 pixels, the sheet and its pieces centered on your ground color. It makes the link, a short address on the Studio Notan site ending in ten letters and digits, and offers ways to send it: ‘Copy link’; ‘Share…’, your device’s own share sheet, where it has one; and buttons for X, Facebook, Pinterest (which takes the picture too), Bluesky, LinkedIn and Email. Sharing the same unchanged design the same way again gives the same link without uploading anything. An empty sheet has nothing to share, and says so. If the connection fails, ‘Try again’ makes another attempt.
Following an ‘Edit a copy’ link opens the studio with the shared design. If the person already had a design of their own, the shared one arrives as one more undo step, and a message tells them that Undo brings theirs back. If they had nothing, the shared design is simply where they start. Either way it is their copy: nothing they do reaches you, and if they share it on, it gets a link of its own.
A photo you are tracing is never included, in the picture or in the design.
Why it works this way
A link rather than a file, because a link needs nothing installed and travels in any message, post or email. A copy rather than a live document, because a share never changes once it is made: the server keeps it fixed, the link always shows what you sent, and nobody’s edits can reach anybody else’s design.
The card is 1200 × 630 because that is the shape the big networks show a link’s picture in. Fitting the whole design into it, on its own ground color, means a tall or square sheet arrives whole instead of cropped.
There are two modes because showing a design and giving it away are different acts. ‘Only view’ lets you show your work while keeping the design, which is the recipe, to yourself.
A shared design opens as an undoable step over your own work so that following a link can never cost you what you were in the middle of. The ten-character ending is drawn from 62 letters and digits, which allows about 840 million billion different links, far too many to guess. The server limits how many shares one internet address can make in a day, to keep the service from being abused, and does the counting without storing the address.
The metaphor
The metaphor is the postcard: a picture on one side, sent through the post, seen by everyone who handles it. ‘Only view’ is exactly that. ‘Edit a copy’ is closer to a pattern passed between makers, a stencil or a template lent so that someone else can cut their own version.
It breaks in scale and in direction. A postcard is one object; a link can be followed by thousands of people, each of whom gets a complete and perfect copy. And a postcard can be written on and sent back, while a copy made from a link never returns to its sender.
A history
In art
Japanese surimono, ‘printed things’, were woodblock prints commissioned privately and made in small numbers for occasions such as the New Year, often by poetry circles, and exchanged as gifts. They flourished from the 1790s to the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai made many, and their makers lavished on them embossing and metallic pigments that ordinary commercial prints rarely carried. They were pictures made to be given away.
In the 1960s the American artist Ray Johnson made the post itself a medium. His network, named the New York Correspondence School in 1962, sent collages and letters marked with instructions such as “please add to and return”. That is the ancestor of ‘Edit a copy’: art sent out to be continued by someone else.
In printing
Printing was the first great sharing technology, and the postcard one of its most successful products. Austria-Hungary’s post office introduced the first official postcards in October 1869, and some three million were mailed in the first three months. Printed picture postcards appeared as early as 1870, in France. Britain allowed the divided back, with message and address sharing one side so that a picture could fill the other, in 1902, and the United States in 1907; in the boom that followed, Americans mailed close to a billion postcards a year.
In technology
A web link is an address anyone can follow, the idea at the heart of the proposal Tim Berners-Lee wrote at CERN in 1989 for what became the World Wide Web. The picture that appears when a link is pasted into a post or a message is newer. It comes from a few lines of description in the page behind the link, most often written in the Open Graph protocol, created at Facebook, whose four required properties are a title, a type, an image and a URL. Studio Notan’s share page carries exactly those, with the 1200 × 630 card as its image. Browsers later gained a way to hand a link to the phone’s own share sheet, which is what ‘Share…’ uses where it exists.
The idea that copying can be generous rather than theft has its own recent history. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, wrote licenses that let people share work for others to build on. ‘Edit a copy’ is that spirit on a small scale.
In professional software
Sharing by link is how most design work now travels. Every program asks the two questions this dialog asks, in its own words: may the person only look, or also change; and do they get a copy, or your file itself?
- Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The Share button makes a review link that opens in a browser, where reviewers comment on the artwork without changing it. A cloud document, saved to Adobe’s cloud instead of your disk, can also be shared by inviting people to edit that document itself.
- Autodesk AutoCAD. Share Drawing, on the Collaborate tab, or the
SHAREcommand, copies a link that opens the drawing in AutoCAD on the web. You choose view only or editing, and an editor saves their own copy while your drawing stays as it was, very like ‘Edit a copy’ here. - Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). A public link opens the design in a 3D viewer in any browser, with nothing to install. You can allow downloads and add a password. The link follows the latest version of the design, where a link here always shows the design as it was when you shared it.
- Figma. The Share button gives a link with view or edit access to the file. Either way it is the live file: an editor’s changes are your changes, and a viewer sees each change as it is made.
What carries over. Before you send a link, decide view or edit, and find out whether the receiver gets a copy or the original. Studio Notan always sends a copy that never changes. In Figma, and with an Adobe cloud document you invite others to edit, other people work in your own file.
Try this
- Share with ‘Only view’, then open the link in a private window to see what others see.
- Share with ‘Edit a copy’, open the link on another device, change the design there, and check that yours is unchanged.
- Share the same design twice without changing it, and compare the links.
Going further
Read on with File and Undo and redo.
- Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web
- Lawrence Lessig, Remix
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction