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Comment by vsviridov | Hacker News Reader

What's with the constant desire to rebrand things that work quite well?

Also, is this a bird or a dolphin, not quite sure...

It communicates to new users that this is a currently maintained project, that it has modern features that they expect, that it works on the latest operating system that they might have installed, etc.

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.

It's weird that actual current maintenance, actual existence of modern features, and actual cross-platform portability doesn't communicate that, but a new logo does.

It’s not that weird.

People work that way. We have several ways to visually communicate that we are current with the general state of the world and we're not slipping away. Logos are one of them for corporations and projects in general.

But these are not necessarily visible for the end-user and guess what, this is what an end-user notices, not if the service is using some of the new state-of-the-art encryption.

Your taking an argument commonly parroted by marketing designers who need to justify their jobs and assume that people actually work that way.

> 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.

> It communicates to new users that this is a currently maintained project

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.

You misunderstood.

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.

It's important only to people who need to justify their marketing and design jobs.

> it's not a productivity-disrupting change

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.

The Linux Foundation then, clearly needs help in the marketing department. "Tux" icon, vintage 1994:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)

https://www.kernel.org/

Perhaps why many have been moving to preferring "Xenia" as the Linux mascot. She's vintage 1996, too, but she has been through quite a few more transformations over the decades.

https://xenia-linux-site.glitch.me/

Just no, sexual fetishes have no place in an OS logo.

I'd rather my open source software oppose corporate wankery trends rather than follow them. The notion that you need to change your logo in order to attract new users is absurd - if the old logo looked like an 8-color Windows 3.1 icon then maybe you'd have a point but the previous Thunderbird logo was plenty modern, no need to chase fleeting design trends.

In this case, the new Thunderbird logo is in a similar style to the Firefox logo, which makes it clearer that the two apps are from the same developer. This can help with user acquisition since Firefox has better brand recognition and a larger user base than Thunderbird.

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.

Should have renamed the client Thunderfox at the same time :)

I liked when Firefox was forked as IceWeasel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat#Origins_of_the_name

> from the same developer

Oh, wow. I apparently missed that they were brought back under the Mozilla umbrella three years ago. Cool.

We should then be expecting K9Mail's logo to change soon.

Because a successful rebrand (like this one) can onboard new users as well as keep existing ones.

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.

It's been literally 5 hours. How could anyone possibly tell if this is successful or not?

I’ve never seen a more positive response to a logo change.

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.

Are you arguing just against change? Like things should remain the same if there's no technical reason to change them? 2 decades is quite a long time for something visual to remain the same.

“2 decades is quite a long time for something visual to remain the same.”

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

You are free to change the icon back locally if it’s really that much of a hit to your productivity.

I was speaking a bit more generally; this is an additional straw added to an overburdened camel, if you care for an analogy.

That is something I could probably do in KDE, which I enjoy for it's configurability. Thank you for the kind suggestion

This is not something that most users can reasonably do, especially for mobile.

The current logo was from 2018.

Yes. Change for the sake of change is bad.

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