🖇️ Podcast Awesome: The Story Behind the Stapler Icon

🔴 “Excuse me … I believe you have my stapler?”

One line. Infinite memes. A red-hot icon.

In this episode of The Story Behind the Icon, we dive deep into the surprisingly rich lore behind the humble office stapler — and how a cult classic film, a soft-spoken cubicle dweller, and a spray-painted prop turned it into a cultural artifact.

🎧 Whether you’ve got 37 pieces of flair or just enough sarcasm to survive corporate life, this one’s for the design nerds, Office Space devotees, and UI jokesters looking for the perfect button metaphor.

🔍 What We Cover in This Episode

🔴 The origin story of Milton’s beloved red stapler
 🎞️ Mike Judge’s animated roots and early Office Space shorts
 💻 Remote work, legacy office gear, and the evolution of workplace design
 🧑‍💼 Font Awesome’s very own “Milton” and the logic behind the madness
 🎨 How to recreate Milton’s soul in HTML with our duotone icon
 🎬 The real reason Swingline started making red staplers

⏰ Timestamps

00:00 – Welcome to Podcast Awesome
 01:25 – A new take on the old office
 02:40 – Meet Milton: The patron saint of passive resistance
 04:20 – Mike Judge: From Beavis and Butthead to box office satire
 05:55 – The stapler becomes an icon
 06:35 – Meet FA’s own Milton (Hi, Steve 👋)
 07:20 – Grumpiness as UI insight
 08:05 – Milton’s stapler wasn’t red... until it was
 09:00 – Design challenge: Where will you use the stapler icon?
09:50 – Commission your own icon or vote one into existence
10:30 – Credits and a final plea: Return. The. Stapler.

🔗 Links & Resources

🖇️ Stapler Icon on Font Awesome
📽️ Office Space (1999)
🎨 Vote for an icon on the leaderboard
📝 FA Blog: The Story Behind the Icon Series

🎥 Podcast Awesome on YouTube – Full uncut convo with extra music nerdiness
🎶 The Font Awesome Theme Song – Composed by Ronnie Martin
🎸 Music Interstitials by Zach Malm
🎬 Produced and edited by Matt Johnson

Stay up to date on all the Font Awesomeness!

Transcript

Behind the Stapler Icon

[00:00:00] Welcome to Podcast. Awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the fun awesome team. I am your host, Matt Johnson. 

That one line launched a thousand inside jokes and one very iconic. Piece of office gear. But how did Milton's obsession with a Red Stapler lead to a design icon of its own?

This is FA one. The story behind the icon.

Ah, the before times. Remember the glory days of cubicle life. Padded beige walls, buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, and one's life dreams slowly fading like a toner starved printout, getting to work on time.

You'd battle traffic just to be passed by an elderly man with a walker on the sidewalkAnd you burst into the building, skip the elevator and bound up the stairs two at a time, arriving at your desk winded but victorious at exactly 9 0 1. Just as you get settled, Deb from HR saunters past and gives you that look, the one that says, "we noticed."

And then you queue up your TPS report and you hit print and the office printer. Jams naturally. Just another magical morning in corporate [00:02:00] paradise. 

Work has changed a lot since the coming of the dreaded 2020 plague, and many of us in the design and tech world now, thankfully, we have the option to work from home for all its pluses and minuses and Font Awesome has been a remote first company since its inception.

From sitting in ergonomically correct office chairs to ergonomically incorrect, couch slouching. We've all adapted to a new style of work life. 

And while many office furnishings like the fax machine, tape dispensers that doubled as paperweights, three hole punches, and landline phones may have lost their utility, the stapler has gone on to gain iconic status. 

Of course, there are pros and cons to the work from home culture shift, but one thing's for sure. We're not interacting with the Miltons of the world much anymore. Who's Milton, you ask? Ah, yes. Milton, the soft spoken anti-hero of Quiet Workplace Rebellion. The Man, the Myth, the Stapler Whisperer.

You probably know who Mike Judge is. You know the guy who gave us Beavis and Butthead.

Yeah.

But what you might not know is that he also created one of the most accidentally prophetic B movies of all time, Idiocracy, from 2006. it's a satire that somehow predicted our modern political landscape fast food, presidential campaigns, corporate sponsorships, and a population watering crops with sports drinks.

[00:04:00] It's not that far off, actually. Anyway, judge was also the guy who went on to bring us King of the Hill and Silicon Valley. I. And he gotta start animating awkward workplace misery.

And early in his career, he dabbled with cartoons, 

Before the 1999 Cult Classic Box Office movie titled Office Space, which starred Ron Livingston, Gary Cole, Steven Root, and Jennifer Aniston.

The 

Animated Shorts titled Office Space aired on MTV's Liquid Television and Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s, and featured Milton, its main character who was really, really attached to a specific stapler. 

And maybe you recognize the Miltons of the office world. no one's entirely sure what they do, but we can all agree the system would probably collapse without them. They know one obscure piece of legacy software better than anyone else at the company. 

And until someone figures out how to update that missing link without making everything crash, Milton's holding the IT department together with bubble gum, stubbornness, and bailing wire. The Miltons of the world know their days are numbered. As soon as corporate finds a way to replace that one sacred function, he's probably toast.

"what would you say you do here?"

And understandably, this makes Milton a little tense. But you know, he keeps his cool. No tantrums, no meeting room meltdowns. He mutters, he internalizes and he seethes, and all that coiled tension, it focuses on one thing, a red stapler.

So here's a little fa fun fact about the Milton [00:06:00] character. You may have noticed that our marketing videos feature a character by the same name, and the actor that plays him is named Steve. Hi, Steve. Meet Font Awesome Milton. He's still rocking the glasses and still radiating that I'll reorganize the file structure without warning energy. 

Font Awesome's Milton, he might be a little more high strung than the Office Space original, so you know. Think less muttering in the break room and more angrily demanding the new intern follow the proper protocol for following the color coded pattern for organizing the office supplies closet. But you know, Milton's got a role to play.  

You're usually gonna find that there's something solid underneath the grumpiness smart specific feedback, and helps you build something better.

So, yeah, Milton's can be a little awkward, But if you're patient and actually listen, they might just show you how to make a better product. 

So Milton's of the world, we salute you!

To Mike Judge's spot on spoof of this soul sucking monotony of corporate office work life, to the fa-Milton whose irate that you've changed the recipe, we're proud to present the stapler icon.

And now when you use our duo tone stapler icon, you can recreate Milton's favorite colorway.

Add red as your primary color, and just a pinch of dim gray as your secondary. And voila, you've recreated Milton's soul in HTML. And fun fact, Milton's coveted stapler was spray painted red. Actually, the swing line stapler company didn't even manufacture a red stapler until three years after the movie's release.

Just another example of art imitating reality, 

So we don't see our oddball icons in the [00:08:00] wild that often, but uh, we believe in you Font Awesome community. Now's your chance. Show off your design flare.

[Movie quote] "We need to talk about your flare. Really? I, I have 15 pieces on."

Maybe you could put the stapler in your UI as a submit form button, or, I don't know, use it ironically, in a workplace culture HR info page, I mean, really there's no rules, just, just red staplers. And did you know you can commission an icon to be officially added to Font Awesome. It's true. All Font Awesome users will have access to the icon and we'll note you as the official sponsor so you can get in touch with us for more details and next steps.

Or you can make an icon request and vote it up the ranks of our icon leaderboard to get it officially added to Font Awesome.

So whether it's a red stapler or a rogue narwhal, every Font Awesome icon has a story, and sometimes that story starts with a mumbling man and a beige cubicle.

This has been The Story Behind the Stapler Icon, and thanks for listening and watching. And please just return the stapler. I mean, really, Milton doesn't ask for much.

This has been another episode of Podcast Awesome In the FA one behind the Icon series. The podcast is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. with these video episodes, I get a little extra helping hand from our friend Isaac Chase. The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin.

The music interstitials were created by Zach Mom, and the audio mastering was done by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions.