A new logo for Thunderbird

It's inevitable that throughout my career, I've had to watch as my work is replaced and updated by other designers. It's extremely rare to be asked to redesign old work, which is why I leapt at the chance when the Thunderbird Team asked if I could design a contemporary update to the Thunderbird logo - the one I designed nineteen years ago!

Thunderbird v115 ('Supernova') is released today, and with it, the new logo:

Mozilla wanted a logo that communicated the improvements they were planning, but didn't abandon all the brand equity that had been built up over all these years. I also explored ideas that only made small updates, going all the way up to a complete reinvention. Sometimes you need to test how far not to go. The sweet spot ended up being in changing the viewpoint, but using the recent Mozilla branding update as a guide. The original logo had become affectionately known as 'the wig', and once seen it can't be unseen! As side-on perspective helps move it away from all that.

As Thunderbird is more than just an email client (RSS feeds, Chat etc), we wanted to see if we could suggest a wider variety of communication. Early on in the process I did a vector sketch of the Thunderbird side-on, and realised I could use the negative space created by the fore-wing to morph the envelope into a speech balloon. This also meant it could keep its 'protective pose'.

Here are the iterations from first sketch to penultimate version. As you can see, I treated it as a monochrome logo first and foremost, with shading added on top later. This was all created in Figma, as I could make good use of components and variants to make it easy to update the outline and maintain a linked flat and shaded version.

The 'flat' version will stilll be used in various contexts, particularly now that Android phones have the option to use adaptive icons.

When Sean Martell redesigned the 2018 version of the Firefox logo, he talked about it being more of an 'elemental being' than an anthropomorphic representation of a real fox. That concept makes so much sense in the context of a logo, and means you're not constrained by the challenges of making an animal fit a square area. I also echoed the shapes of Sean's version, incorporating elements of the Firefox Logo flipped horizontally. You'll see in v5 above that the wing shapes on the left were oddly stuff and spiky, and incorporating the more fluid shapes worked so much better:

However, unlike Firefox, I felt that Thunderbird still needed to keep the eye. It's an important anchoring element, to draw your eye to first, so I kept it high contrast: simple and white. Anything more complex than that would reduce its impact.

There was a soft launch of the new logo on Mastodon back in May, and since then I've refined it further, making subtle changes to make it less evil:

Essentially, the eye is just rotated very slightly, and the shadows around the eye and under the beak are much less pronounced. Small changes, but they make a big difference to the overall feel.

Thanks to the Thunderbird team for being such lovely people to work with, and for the opportunity to revisit and improve old work!