Related Posts
Daily Do! 
Heartsposted over 4 years agoMozilla 16×16 Application Icons
From what I understand, consistency of brand image is a pretty important thing to maintain across any product line.
I respect Mozilla for their products, their overall ideology and their great community. It’s probably safe to say Firefox is easily the #1 most used application on my computer. And Thunderbird doesn’t lag too far behind. I started using Sunbird a while ago as well, but stopped when Lightning became better integrated into Thunderbird.
The logos/icons for each of these applications are well crafted, extremely iconic, and work well together as a “suite”, contributing to a consistent overall brand image.
That said, I am somewhat perplexed by a really small detail that has gone unfixed for years: The Mozilla 16×16 Windows application icons.
A Small Thing
Take a look at the Mozilla icons lined up in the Windows quick launch bar below.
Though minute in differentiation, the icons lack a consistent size and alignment. In addition to this, the icons (especially for Sunbird) have not been scaled down too well, causing a loss of detail.
Making Small Things Consistent
As simple as it is, all I’ve really done here is scaled the original larger icons down to 16 pixels and ensured that they all line up and appear to be the same size.
The result: a much cleaner, visually consistent set of icons for your Windows quick launch bar.
Feel free to download the new set and use them for your quick launch bar. I’m going to see if the folks over at Mozilla might have any use for these.
It’s interesting that you didn’t even need to remove any of the detail in order for them to still be legible!
One of the glories and curses of open source projects is that we trust various people to be responsible for their own parts of the project. The simple answer here is that the Firefox and Thunderbird and Sunbird people don’t really co-ordinate on UI, as that sort of negotiation takes time and resource that we simply don’t have to hand. We count on people like you to notice these things, and tell us about them as you have done.
I’d encourage you to file bugs on Thunderbird and Sunbird at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org !
Mike, thanks so much for the comment!
I’m actually quite surprised to hear that the different teams don’t coordinate. Under Aza Raskin, I figured there’s some coordination. I’m sure there is a general organizational approach to things, but I guess the details can get overlooked.
I’ve definitely filed bugs on bugzilla, but it’s always tricky classifying UI issues such as these as bugs. Often they don’t get taken very seriously by developers, or they get lost in the piles of more “urgent” issues.
Nonetheless I’ll take your cue and submit this to bugzilla!
Thanks again