We are looking for a new icon for Emacs. If you have comments and suggestions please send them to Emacs mailing lists (help-gnu-emacs or emacs-devel). To the left you see the splash image that may be shown when starting Emacs. (This is supposed to remain and it is shown here just for inspiration.)
Icons should be possible to use in such small sizes as 16x16 pixels, at least on MS Windows. Other common sizes are 32x32 and 48x48. However in many cases where an icon is used only a 16x16 picture is shown. This may be an actual 16x16 picture or a scaled down version of a bigger picture. Usually it is possible to get far better quality by supplying an actual 16x16 icon. The same holds of course for bigger icons.
The smallest icons below are in 16x16 size. Note that for an icon really to be useful that little image should be recognizeable easily among other icons.
Another thing to consider is that the icons should be visible on different backgrounds, on white, on darker backgrounds etc (consider the desktop colors for example). I find this rather hard especially with small icons. Sometimes it can help to have both a lighter and a darker part in the icon.
Note: I have tried to show the icons on many different background colors, both dark and light, in those case where I have a transparent picture (and have had time to handle it). JavaScript must be turned on for this to work - and I have only tested with Firefox. So turn off JavaScript if you do not want to see all the color variants!
The last row here in every box contains the icons choosen. For 16x16 pixels there are two versions. Which of these to use is not yet decided.
Gian:
Here is a version that Gian have been very kind and made for me. I like his finishing. It shows very well what can be done. Unfortunately I did not tell Gian that I was going to test dark backgrounds too so he had no chance to handle that this time. But it is very clear on the white background:
