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

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

Can't wait for the new Thunderbird!

Really lovely redesign.

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.

Wow this is one of the best logo redesigns I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely keeps the spirit and distinct identity of the old one, but looks a whole lot crisper and fresher. Huge props.

I hate Apple mail. Should I try Thunderbird?

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.

I don't remember the last time a logo redesign actually came out beautiful and sensible. Well done!

Gotta say, looks really good! On brand and on-point. I was worried before clicking that this would be similar to the time the Firefox logo almost copied the Gitlab logo. Glad to see that's not the case!

This is a surprisingly good design. After seeing the headline on HN, I was convinced it was going to be terrible and lead to a ton of rants. But mostly positive comments so far.

Well it looks like Betterbird war is having an affect on Thunderbird itself. While not the same logo, it has a similar "feel" to the Betterbird logo. Now if Thunderbird will finally make it possible to NOT have threading as the default for new accounts or have an easy button to remove threading, rather than the cumbersome way they do it now, (listen to the endusers guys , not the sponsored contributors), we will all feel a little bit more love for the venerable Thunderbird. I do like the new logo though.

So they changed the envelope into a chat bubble... because envelopes are obsolete?

Does this mean they intend to add chat features?

Personally, while i like the new logo on its own, it seems too similar to the Firefox logo - enough to create some confusion. Further, since Mozilla has lowered its level of support over the years, I'm not sure it makes sense to commit more to the Mozilla brand, especially since Firefox itself has been steadily losing market share.

Now it's just a fox looking like a bird. Not a fan

...because it was the logo that was holding Thunderbird back.

More deckchair rearrangement from Mozilla, sadly.

Please fix bugs, search and slowness. Pour time and money into that.

It's hard to get too excited about a logo change. It basically fluff and has zero impact on the functionality of the client, but I'll admit that I do like it over the old one and since I know they're also working on changes that matter as well, I really can't complain.

I might just start using Thunderbird because of this. I'm only half joking.

In both logos, it looks like the bird is protecting the mail, which was a nice touch to hang on to.

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.

Guess I should pay attention to urls more. I was all excited that this was a new logo for the Thunderbirds, as in Thunderbirds are Go! Again!

With JMS hyping the B5 logo update just before announcing the new animated series, it makes one hopeful for other franchises

It's nice! Definitely better than the old one.

Maybe a little bit too Firefox-y, but nice.

Real question from someone genuinely curious: why would one use Thunderbird, or any third-party email client? What benefits does this offer over using the UI provided by your email provider (assuming that you aren't self-hosting)?

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

What?

Why replace a friendly bird with a fierce, unfriendly one?

I think the old logo was very good.

As somebody who has been using TB for many years and still think it's the best mail client for my needs around, I... don't care? I mean, old logo was fine with me. New logo is OK too I guess. Neither is really on the top of my concerns. I'd rather have calendar integration working (still can't see stuff from my Google and Outlook calendars in TB). Or stuff like QuickFolders integrated.

Looks great, but I wish I could use the regular icon on macOS as well. Not a fan of the ensquirclification of macOS app icons

I love the way the new logo shows the envelope as a speech / chat bubble (notice the tail formed by the wing). Subtle touches like these make a logo a lot more interesting for me.

I liked this one, with the Ubuntu fonts: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/thunderbird-102-release... (I like Ubuntu fonts, one of the few reasons I still use Ubuntu, despite it being more and more of a hassle)

It's not horrible, but I kind of prefer the style from BeOS or Gnome2...

Why does the bird look so angry?

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.

Honestly this is artistic genius at Escheresque level. The thunderbird outline (better reflecting the mozilla link) gets to shape with its body (suggesting hugging and protecting) both a mail envelope and a chat bubble! The economy of representation is just amazing.

> 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...

I like it.

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.

It's okay? I think what bothers me the most about it is that the envelope is smaller, and not front and center anymore. I get that the idea was to make it look more like the Firefox logo, and it succeeds in that regard, but I liked that the envelope was the big, rectangular thing which dominated the logo. That's what my eyes are looking for and expect if I'm searching for 'the mail program' on my desktop or phone or anywhere.

I think it looks shit. Why? Because the old one looked friendly and the new one looks fierce. This tendency is a disease with many objects nowadays. Cars especially. Everything and everybody wants to look angry and dangerous. And that's not a good thing.

1. Why does it look aggressive/frowning? 2. It has become so generic it looks almost exactly the same as Firefox logo when the colors have been reduced to just one.

Overall: unnecessary and detrimental redesign.

My eye was drawn to the adaptive Android one first and couldn’t figure out why there was a clock in the middle.

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

If you look at the old and new logos together: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/new-t...

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.

Android really screwed up icons with 'adaptive icons'. I really liked it when icons had different shapes as they were more distinctive.

Love it.

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.

It's kinda funny that the more pixels our screens have the less detailed logos are

I prefer the old one https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Mozilla_Thunderbird_...

Looks great! Evokes "Thunderfox" moreso than "Thunderbird" but that appears to be the point, and it works well.

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.