The brand new Thunderbird logo
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Also, is this a bird or a dolphin, not quite sure...
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.
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.
Does this mean they intend to add chat features?
More deckchair rearrangement from Mozilla, sadly.
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.
With JMS hyping the B5 logo update just before announcing the new animated series, it makes one hopeful for other franchises
Maybe a little bit too Firefox-y, but nice.
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
Why replace a friendly bird with a fierce, unfriendly one?
I think the old logo was very good.
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.
> 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...
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.
Overall: unnecessary and detrimental redesign.
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
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 looks 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.
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 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.