07/29/2009
It's not the THE new icon
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| More on the Emacs icon |
I've had a couple of twitter messages and email responses about my post to create a new Emacs icon. To be clear about that post, I'm not looking to build the new Emacs icon. I'm interesting in building a new Emacs icon. I just want a new icon that I can use. Something more modern and that I'm comfortable keeping on my screen all day long. Something that people will want to use, even if they don't use Emacs.
See, the problem with building an official new icon is that there are all kinds of considerations like "branding," "consistency," "accessibility" and the whole Emacs has a 100+ year history thing. I love Emacs, and I'm glad it has such a rich history and a powerful "brand," but I'm not interested wading into those waters.
I'm interested in creating a separate, totally unofficial icon. I'm suggesting we reimagine the whole thing from the ground up. What would an icon look like for the Emacsen of today. The not-quite-text-editor, not-quite-operating-system, passable-tetris-client, etc. What does that icon look like? Does it have an animal mascot of some kind? (I'm nixing the GNU/Bison thing). Is it abstract? I don't know... But we should try to figure it out.
Greg Newman has volunteered his wonderful artistic abilities in the coming weeks, so something is going to happen. But if you have any thoughts, please blog it, join the twitter conversation or email me directly.