The brand new Thunderbird logo
blog.thunderbird.net
blog.thunderbird.net
Designer John Hicks post about this:
https://mastodon.social/@jonhicks/110424132785208582
> It's inevitable that throughout my career, I've watched as work gets replaced and updated by others. It's rare to be asked to redesign old work, which is why I leapt at the chance when @thunderbird asked if I could design a contemporary update to the Thunderbird logo. The one I designed 19 years ago!
More images here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lRkSA9YyHduCmDe2Fucv2DK2l9a...
Based on that file being "v7" I'm really hoping John does a post detailing the design process. I always love to see how these things evolve.
This post makes some very good points about it https://mastodon.social/@KelvinShadewing/110424262996045829
* Long, sharp beaks are characterestic of nectar feeders, e.g. hummingbird, not "lethal predators".
* Hawk's beak is neither large nor particularly sharp; and while hawk is a deadly predator, and the new logo is hawk-like, I can't see the hawk as a bad thing;
* Everything else is purely subjective, too. "Dead white eyes convey malice"? OK.
Finally, re:"Message is mine, not yours"? Well, that's the entire point of an email client. It keeps the mail, it doesn't live on the server.
If that comes through the logo, then it's a job well done.
[1] https://www.dkfindout.com/us/animals-and-nature/birds/types-...
It's a well known trope
> It is considered a supernatural being of power and strength
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProphetEyes
> And sometimes, white eyes simply alert the audience that their owner is supernatural
Ok?
?
Most people use IMAP accounts nowadays
And if your account goes poof, you still have all your messages.
Well, sure. Nearly anything anyone has to say about the logo is purely subjective. That's the way of art.
I would much rather that the bird delivering my mail is a badass who can protect it at all costs. Perhaps the protective "MINE" body language is aimed at someone trying to intercept my mail, not at me. This is a much better scenario than a fake-ass overly friendly bird.
Also, the old logo always made me a little uncomfortable—it looks like the bird is mid flight, but the moment it flaps its wings up it's dropping that letter!!!
Sorry, but the bird in the new logo looks like a baby bird.
Well, it's certainly a taste thing, but I dislike the "angry bird". Whatever the meaning that was intended, it looks like a warning that I shouldn't use it. It's also a bit like the fashion for the "angry" look of trucks, but the other way around. Driving trucks styled that way feels like I'm telling the world how much I hate it.
But it's all irrelevant. I'm not going to stop using Thunderbird just because I dislike the logo.
All I saw was hostility. After the other interpretation was pointed out, I can see that -- but I have to force myself to see it. I still just see hostility by default.
I guess no matter how good the design is, you have to think about how it looks in 16x16 & 32x32 when most people only see the logo when they look at the tiny icon on their desktop
I'm saying this as a person who likes the old icon better.
Most of the time I see a logo redesign, it's a mess that makes the product more difficult to recognize, and makes things look more generic.
Not so this time! Immediately you feel that the Thunderbird and Firefox belong in the same family, while still immediately recognizing that the new logo is the same Thunderbird you know and love.
It stuck so fast, I had to look app the current logo to remember how it looks like!
> Yes, we have officially added an iOS version of Thunderbird to our future development roadmap. Expect more concrete news about this toward the end of 2023.
So it doesn't exist yet, but they're going to make it, and at least they've got a logo for it.
I anxiously clicked, expecting to see an overly simple, flat, gradient filled shape with no character.
But this is perhaps one of the few I’ve seen in a long time that manages to maintain a sense of character while also taking just enough from modern trends to feel fresh and like it belongs next to other current day apps.
that other MCU is just a cheap rip-off trying to imitate moving app icons with CGI ;)
Somewhat aside: as a long time Mac user, it bums me out how the current macOS/iOS design language distracts from the logo as an icon. The Windows variation is much better, and would’ve fit right in on a Mac just a few years ago.
> Many of us inside Rogue Amoeba lament the recent "flattening" of app icons on the Mac, and the attendant loss of personality.
[1]: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2022/09/09/the-design-of-audi...
The silly white background squircle trend was set by the chromium/electron apps and it’s the opposite of the Human Interface Guidelines which recommend a distinctive and rich app icon.
“In macOS, app icons share a common set of visual attributes, including a rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow.“ [1]
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
At least it is still possible to use custom icons in Mac OS. But don't tell Apple!
It looks flat and generic and soulless. But I recognise this is a matter of opinion.
The old one was bringing you the envelope whereas the new one is protective of it. The old bird had a neutral but confident expression. The new one looks angry and it looks like it's in free fall - no sure footing. I like to imagine it as a goalie who just saved a super fast shot and is now drifting backwards with the ball. It also looks like an infant, it might be because it is not depicted in flight and the way they chose to use the wing like a hand makes it look like underdeveloped wings. Plus the lack of confidence and or discontent communicated with the angry face.
All said, I think visually it's quite nice. I don't mind an angry infant bird doing its best to hold onto my email.
Easy enough to fix, but the bottom beak and the gaping maw isn’t too obvious… unless it’s pointed out.
The old logo can be seen as the bird holding the envelope with its wings, hence unable to flap, without dropping the envelope. But if the bird doesn't flap, it'll fall? It's caught between a rock and a hard place.
Anyway I like both logos, beautiful
It is also interesting that the basic shape is the same between the Thunderbird and Firefox, but it doesn’t really look like the fox is protecting the Earth orb thingy.
You just did :)
Also, is this a bird or a dolphin, not quite sure...
i.e.
you are unlikely to stop using Thunderbird because of this redesign, but someone who doesn't use it now has an increased chance of starting.
I honestly can’t think of any positive response to a logo change lately. The flattening of Google’s word mark a decade ago is the most recent that comes to mind. I’m sure there are others, but the point is they’re almost never this well-received, imo.
Which increases my chance of identifying the icon at a glance considerably, since most apps I use have either not existed for 20 years, or have had multiple logo changes in that time.
All this change just means I am effectively icon blind in most computing situations, which is a real annoyance and hindrance to productivity
That is something I could probably do in KDE, which I enjoy for it's configurability. Thank you for the kind suggestion
As an aside, when Thunderbird first launched, Firefox was called Firebird, so their names were similar as well. The browser was renamed to Firefox in 2004 to avoid confusion with the Firebird database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat#Origins_of_the_name
Oh, wow. I apparently missed that they were brought back under the Mozilla umbrella three years ago. Cool.
It's obviously important for a commercial project, but even for an open source non-profit it's important, because you want to have an active base of contributors and if you aren't getting new ones they'll slowly diminish over time.
I feel like many here might disagree that this should be the case, even if realistically it kind of is for most people. To that end, I'm curious whether there are any projects out there that have decided that this is "silly" and instead are alive and doing well, without caring about UI and aesthetics that much, focusing on UX more instead.
I think the logo and look of something like Audacity, Handbrake, ManicTime or KeePass comes to mind.
Busywork, which I consider logo change to be, doesn't really make a project seem "maintained". But at least it's not a productivity-disrupting change so... whatever floats their boat.
It's not the regular change of logos that people notice and then think that that must mean that the project is active.
It's more that design trends change with times, and color gradients currently went out of fashion (but will come back, in a later design trend), so it's important to adapt to current design trends once in a while.
If you don't do that, people subconsciously dismiss the software without trying, assuming that it won't run, or won't be able to handle modern workflows.
No users -> no contributors -> project dies.
You've seen benign instances, then. Every time I see a company do this kind of thing it takes one or more engineers nontrivial time to go update everything.
Took my brain a moment to realise it was supposed to be an envelope. Now I’ve seen the clock on that one, I can’t unsee it
Overall: unnecessary and detrimental redesign.
I have often seen this. Products going through an identity crisis try to reinvent themselves and then fail miserably at it. So they end up doing things like logo change, font change, and more enterprising ones cite a new revolutionary made up design philosophy. I do hope I am wrong about Thunderbolts though.
> I think it looks shit
> And that's not a good thing.
Is there really no middle ground? It's either great or shit?
Your comment sounds quite angry, is it the effect of the new logo influencing you? /s
maybe it's supposed to be evocative of pheonix from greek mythology - rising from the ashes.
just checked the current firefox logo. i'd say it's neutral with regard to its mood - the eyes in the thunderbird logo set the tone.
Before Firefox was Firefox it was Firebird, and before that, it was Phoenix.
I should probably just be happy that the logo redesign doesn't look strictly worse, like they usually do.
[0] possibly autistic, even
[0]: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/launch/icon_d...
On Samsung devices running One UI 4.x you still have to install an additional app for that: https://galaxystore.samsung.com/detail/com.samsung.android.t...
I'm not sure what's available in GrapheneOS (quick search tells me it's not supported).
Why replace a friendly bird with a fierce, unfriendly one?
I think the old logo was very good.
At least it's actually half decent design not... whatever the google though with their icons
In all fairness, they're catering for the majority of users. Mobile has overaken desktop in web traffic.
Does this mean they intend to add chat features?
With JMS hyping the B5 logo update just before announcing the new animated series, it makes one hopeful for other franchises
I loved Unibox because it grouped email by contact - this fit my workflow way better than grouping chronologically or by thread. It was not sorted by “from” but rather the main view was just contact names and clicking on the name would show a list of emails. It was so great. Much like other message apps. I only stopped using it - years after the developers stopped updating it - because I was worried about a future OS update breaking it.
Does Thunderbird or any other mail client do this? My memory from a billion internet years ago is that the UI is similar to all other email clients, especially Apple mail.
If you click on the contact it shows a list of their emails. If you then click a button in the top email, that will give you a threaded email view which will show the whole mailing list activity chronologically.
I don’t use mailing lists much so there were probably better ways of doing it. But I actually thought unibox’s threaded view was really great.
That said, there are plenty of email clients that deal with mailing lists. What about one for me? :)
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m old enough to have used Netscape on Linux as my primary mail client.
So going back to thunderbird after all these years… gives me mixed feelings. But I’ll take it for a spin and see.
On another note, the absolute best mail client i have ever used is FairEmail on android. It even beats Thunderbird on the desktop. If you run android i highly recommend that too.
On the Desktop I have been using Mailspring for awhile and am also super happy with it!
Huh, I guess I can kind of see that? But at the same time, the shading also really makes it look like an envelope, which is more or less what you'd expect from a mail client. I rather like the bird part of the logo, but the envelope/arrow feels not as prominent or obvious as I'd expect. Still an okay logo, though.
The fact that we're talking about it shows that this is in fact a minor(?) design flaw. Ideally it should be obvious that it is an envelope, not an arrow, so that a user who's never seen the logo before immediately knows what it represents.
Haha yeah, though I could probably also imagine a down arrow logo, for mailbox folders or something. You're right that there's a bit missing for an actually distinctive letter shape, notably the rectangular edges. But those would clash with the circular shape.
[1] https://k9mail.app/2022/06/13/K-9-Mail-and-Thunderbird.html
I'm confused. Can't you just hit the "Display message threads" button to toggle threading on and off?
So here we have the color purple, an angry (vicious?) creature that looks like it is devouring your communications, and, as usual, a triangle in a circle. Nothing new under the sun.
I think a more balanced approach to the positioning of the eye might look better. It looks much less angry in the Android Adaptive version.
https://ubuntu.com/legal/font-licence says that
> This licence allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely.
That is, you can use them on other distributions (or operating systems), and they can distribute them if they want (I believe for example Mint comes with Ubuntu fonts as default).
Gut feeling when a logo change is usually negative. Remember when Google updated their logo? Man that looked awful. But looking back, their old logo wasn't very good.
The same for Instagram. The old logo might have had more character, but it is also so dated.
I for one have swallowed my pride on those and admitted that, yes, the professional designer was right. They needed an update and the update was better.
My only critique is that the Android Adaptive version looks entirely different to the primary version. I think if they'd gone an outline route - like the Gmail/Photos/Settings icons on Android do - it would've retained more of the spirit of the primary version, rather than the inversion which seems to literally invert the general "feel" of it.
I assume there are benefits -- I guess one I can think of off the top of my head is that your email is accessible offline. Surely there are others though
Having your mails accessible offline is more of a protocol question.
- I can search all of my emails at once.
- I don't need to worry that much about account management.
1. Unified single entry-point into all my email accounts. I I can search through all of them even while keeping them isolated from each other (to allow searching individually).
2. Latency: when I want to open an email it does not require a 500ms delay, as in gmail, roundcube, whatever. You may think this is not a problem, but if you perform a search and want to quickly open all 15 of the results, that latency adds up quickly.
3. Slicker UI, in most cases. Especially in searching (which is different from "filtering"). UI for adding rules to kill based on patterns is a lot easier than gmail, for example.
To be honest though, looking at my points above, it basically comes down to "searching is better on local client".
Why are you implying I only use one provider?
I especially like how the round envelope fold is contrasted with the background enough to be immediately recognizable as an envelope despite having a very non-envelope shape.
More deckchair rearrangement from Mozilla, sadly.
[0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...
It'd be like saying no Microsoft developers work on GitHub or LinkedIn. They all work for Microsoft. They're a distinct group within Mozilla/Microsoft, but they're not outside of it.
> Jason Sneer > Using a white background and slapping the icon on top of that is just lazy… The adaptive icon exists for Android, which means that you can use a glyph on top of a colored background. Why go with the white background?
> Jason Evangelho > Read the entire post? There is an Android Adaptive version.
Does it annoy anyone else to see people who write statements and put a question mark in front? "Read the entire post" is not a question, and shouldn't have a question mark.
> carrying us forward into the next 20 years
Thats the catch. The new logo sets sky-high expectations :-)
Thunderbird is the natural client to the emerging fediverse. It can offer a consistent interface to help users organize locally and privately the torrent of information they exchange with others, whether that is email, rss or anything exchanged via activitypub servers (toots, events, book reviews etc).
The era of "super-apps" is upon us [1]. Users prefer fewer and better apps that bundle related functions. The question is how the open source and privacy respecting universe will respond to the onslaught of walled-garden super apps.
The browser/firefox is the obvious first super-app. It is powerful enough to be called an OS within an OS. It is invaluable to have a privacy-first window to the Web. But its true character is a sandboxed, stateless window. Users click and scroll and leave a behavioral footprint on somebody else's server.
Which may be ok. Or not. Because you can overload the browser to create (among many others) webmail, but that is not an empowering, user-centric and privacy-first design. This is where thunderbird comes in.
The personal agent/thunderbird super-app is the (largely under-developed) second opportunity for the open source universe. Its character is a stateful window to fediverse (or Web 3), helping to organize the world's subset of information in a way that is intimate to the user. Local information, local intelligence.
Which brings to the natural (and unavoidable these days) conclusion: To realize the full potential of thunderbird as a personal agent it will be quite important to develop a versatile plugin ecosystem that can tap locally-run "AI" services.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/22738395/social-media-super-app-fac...
Modern, reflecting current design trends, and refreshing.
Congratulations on the team who worked on it!
That's exactly why I hate it.
Maybe a little bit too Firefox-y, but nice.
Going back to a desktop e-mail client seems like a step into the long past. Mine as start sending hand written messages and licking stamps..
I use Apple Mail for reading mail because I have email accounts at a number of different providers and web UIs differ so easier to bring everything into one app. Also, sometimes it’s good to have email offline.
> Mine as start sending hand written messages and licking stamps..
I do that too, sometimes.