External Link Icon Generator

What the external link icon means

This link leaves the current site or opens a new context. Accessibility guidance treats it as required, not decorative.

Action icons label something the user is about to do, which makes ambiguity expensive: an unlabelled icon that could mean two different actions will eventually be clicked by mistake. Upload and download, cut and copy, refresh and undo are all pairs that differ by a few pixels. As an app icon this class works well because action symbols are geometrically simple — arrows, ticks and crosses survive any downscaling — but the meaning is generic, so the mark relies on colour and container for identity.

Where you will actually see it

• outbound links in documentation
• terms and third-party references
• admin panels linking to live resources

Drawing the external link at 16 pixels

The box-plus-arrow combination is two shapes in one small square. Below 16px drop the box and keep only the diagonal arrow.

Stroke weight is the control that matters most here. Lucide icons are drawn on a 24 × 24 grid with a 2px stroke, which means that when the icon is scaled down to 16px the stroke is effectively 1.33px — below one device pixel on a standard-density display. Raising the stroke to 2.5 or 3 before exporting keeps the shape solid; lowering it to 1.5 suits large app icons where a heavy stroke looks clumsy. The editor exposes this as a slider, so you can find the value that survives your smallest target size rather than guessing.

Using it in code

If you want the icon in a Vue project rather than as a downloaded asset, it is a named export of the lucide package:

import { ExternalLink } from 'lucide-vue-next'

<ExternalLink :size="24" :stroke-width="2" />

The download button above gives you something different: the icon composed onto a background with a corner radius, exported as a flat SVG path set. The exporter converts the icon out of its <foreignObject> wrapper first, because a foreign object taints an HTML canvas and would otherwise break PNG and ICO rasterisation.

Related icons

Other icons in the actions group.