New Thunderbird artwork checked in

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April 21, 2004

The Mozilla Visual Identity Team has completed the new artwork for Mozilla Thunderbird, as Steven Garrity (Mozilla Visual Identity Team leader) reports.

Jon Hicks describes the process behind the design of the logo. Go check it out.

Naturally, I’m disappointed by there not being a new default theme for Thunderbird as I’d previously thought had been hinted at. But still, it is a great-looking logo, isn’t it? It doesn’t look like the mythical Thunderbird in Native American art that Jon Hicks pointed to in his post to me though. That would have looked cooler and made for a less demure bird - it is a thunderbird after all ;).

The new logo is included as the application icon in today’s (2004-04-20) nightly build.Looks pretty nice as a 32 x 32 icon.

The smaller 16 x 16 version, however, doesn’t seem to scale well and you can’t really tell that it’s a bird (with a resolution of 1024 x 768).

On a brighter note, the about dialog looks just awesome.

Screenshot of the new Thunderbird About dialog

Posted by Chu Yeow at April 21, 2004 SGT |

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| Category: Mozilla

8 Comments & TrackBacks ()

You’re right, 16px isn’t great, but I’m working on it. Although I like it more now that people have referred to it as ‘the wig’!!

Posted by: Jonathan Hicks on April 21, 2004 5am

On the 16×16 one you might not be able to tell it’s a bird… but you can tell it’s an envelope. I mean, it is pretty hard to make good 16×16 icon that looks good - I think this manages it.

Posted by: Colin Ramsay on April 21, 2004 5am

Sorry - forgot to add. My confidentiality slip up was in reference to a new Firefox theme being developed, not Thunderbird.

Posted by: Jonathan Hicks on April 21, 2004 5am

Very very nice work Jonathan, I totally love it.

Posted by: Bart N. on April 21, 2004 9pm

Nice, Jonathan, that you guys are going to be making updates as you get feedback. I noticed too on your blog and Steven Garrity’s (after reading your comment) that others feel the same way about the 16 x 16 icon, and that in fact you guys are full well aware of it. I like it how you guys on the Visual Identity team have been handling the feedback so amicably and pleasantly.

And yeah the theme thing was my misunderstanding. I was hoping though!

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on April 21, 2004 11pm

thunderbird
sono state finite le nuove icone di thunderbird, (sono già disponibili dalla nightly version di ieri). L’opera è di Jon Hicks, il quale tra l’altro spiega in un articolo dedicato all’avvenimento come è nata la nuova immagine del clie…

Posted by: Full(o)bloG on April 22, 2004 8am

though i have seen the icon on Jonathan’s site earlier, when I came here today and looked at the smaller icon in the orange square at first it looked like the head of an anime character. See the envelope lines look like a mad expression on a face and the shadow of the envelop looks like the mouth, and well the bird as hair is just obvious. I either need to get myself a mac OSX computer or start using one of those shell replacement programs so I too can enjoy large icons in my system tray.

Posted by: Ken Garland on April 22, 2004 8pm