Thunderbird (2018)Copied

A year after Firefox got a new logo, Mozilla's email client followed. German site Deskmodder reported in May 2018 that Thunderbird would ship a reworked logo with the upcoming version 60: clearly simpler, with stronger colours. It was the third logo since 2004.

When Thunderbird 60 was released in August, the project's own blog presented the new mark alongside the Photon visual refresh, which brought square tabs, a togglable title bar and new light and dark themes, in step with Firefox. The team said it was very pleased with branding that mirrored the Quantum-style upgrade of its sister project, credited its design partner with spearheading the logo update, and published the full set of brand assets online.

The idea is family resemblance. The simpler, stronger-coloured mark, built around a white envelope, is meant to sit next to the Firefox icon as a pair. One commenter on the Thunderbird blog said it was great to see the two desktop icons side by side, like brother and sister.

The designers' own case study explained the gap they were closing. Mozilla moving away from Thunderbird, it said, had left technical and design debt: Firefox's logo had been made over in 2010, 2013 and 2017, while Thunderbird's branding had not been touched since 2010. The work came with extensive usability research, and the studio acknowledged that open source communities often resist change from outsiders, crediting the project for being welcoming. That context makes the cautious result easier to forgive; a neglected project first needed to look like it still had a family.

Deskmodder's author was less convinced. He admitted he found some of the alternative proposals considerably more successful than the logo finally chosen, and that the white envelope in particular took some getting used to. One reader preferred the 2004 to 2009 logo with its strong colours; another, having installed the beta, said the icon looked out of place, as if not quite finished.

That last verdict is unkind but understandable. Matching Firefox was the right strategic call for a project that needed to look current, and the brighter palette does that. But the envelope is a blank rectangle at the heart of the mark, and in a logo for an email client, the least interesting part is the one about email.