I caught up with JoRoan Lazaro, who designed the icon for AOL when he worked there in the mid-'90s. (Lazaro went on to work at EA, Second Life, and a handful of advertising agencies. Today he's creative director at The Martin Agency in New York.) Here's the lightly edited and condensed version of what he told me about the running man's origins.

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"The design was part of a larger redesign effort that was in the first half of 1997 where we redid the entire client software and all of the content channels. It was a really great opportunity to jump into digital, which was a very nascent kind of a discipline back then. The version of AOL, the client software back then, was 3.0. It was still very—how do you say without being too negative?—it was still kind of primitive.

"The iconography looked a little bit more like Microsoft Word. There were rendered icons, they weren't labeled. It was sort of a functional interface. What we did as a design was we embedded a web browser into the client toolbar. That was significant because back then we were still literally teaching people how to 'surf the net,' use email. Instant messaging was brand new. This was a very new thing. There was no formal [web design] discipline, but I did have a background in design and magazine design.

"The [running man] design came about because I was spending a lot of time looking at 1940s and '50s postwar American logos and trademarks. If you go back to '40s and '50s logos and trademarks, you'll see that there's actually quite a few men that were used—a silhouette that either had curved legs or angular legs and a round head, in addition to the ones that looked quite a bit more stylized or looked really, really human. The running man was really inspired by those.

"If you go through the history of '40s and '50s design, you'll see there's a sideways man with a round head that was very similar. You can see that it looked very much like that. Back then, the brands were using a lot of anthropomorphic if not outright people figures. The brands were trying to communicate essentially that they were reliable, authentic, they had quality and personality. So they would have simple farmers or electricians or plumbers holding things. That was the core concept ... to actually have a person holding the objects that stood for something [across the toolbar]. There were hundreds of versions. The idea was there was a man holding a pencil for 'write email,' a man holding an envelope for 'read mail,' a heart for 'favorites.' I went for something that was quite a bit more literal. Up until [right before launch], there were a lot more people holding objects. But at the very end we decided to take out some of them because some discussion and some other things going on, we decided to just dial down the number of people on the toolbar.