The new icon is ugly, in my opinion.
More specifically, the new shape of the stone is ugly.
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I know change sparks a strong reaction, especially when unexpected (I speak from personal experience and a general dislike of change), but the more I think about it—and the more I reflect on why they went with that design—the more it grows on me. It helps that there are already color and styling variations, though I’m going to use a custom dark gray/black one where I can (because obsidian).
That plus the need for an image that they had complete creative control over (which they didn’t with the old one) makes me increasingly okay with the change.
I think the community will largely come around to this new design and come to love it (almost?) as much as the original.
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I’m a fan!
At least it now better resembles an actual piece of Obsidian and not some weird gemstone. The old one always seemed like a weird choice to me.
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Don’t you think that the bottom is too flat for a random stone? It should be more asymmetrical in my opinion.
I agree with your point about the gemstone though.
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I like it, exactly because it is rough but recognisable, a little bit unshaped but still useful and beautiful - just like my notes 
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I like the new icon – looks glassier and truer (though not true) to real obsidian.
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I don’t see it as a random stone so much as a piece of obsidian (which is basically volcanic glass) in the process of being honed and refined into a purposeful shape. It’s neither raw nor complete but in the process of becoming something more—just like the collection of information within my vault.
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I like it. The old icon looks like a crystal; the new one looks like a piece of actual rock—or obsidian. It’s also more recognizable in monochrome.
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I often tend to see things that are not intentionally part of a design or present in a photo. Does anyone think that the logo is meant to read as OBS? It feels too clear to be a coincidence.
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Whether or not the new icon looks more like real Obsidian doesn’t help the fact that the old icon was just cooler in my opinion. I’ve been trying all day to like the new icon but so far, I really prefer the old one. Let’s see if it grows on me.
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I couldn’t see it until I came back here and looked at the white version in the header, and then only because I was looking for it. Seems unintended to me, but who knows?
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My two cents.
I personally like the fact that now the stone is wider. It is easier for me to find on dark and High DPI screens.
Before it was too skinny and was visually easy to lose.
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To me, it only looks good as a favicon with color.
When looking at the enlarged icon, it’s unappealing. I think it’s trading off the sharper lines for the rounded edges and doing little to adjust the shading and brightness for that change. When I see it enlarged, the shading on the bottom side of it doesn’t make sense for my brain in the scope of the whole icon. It’s very hard to tell what the shape would look like as a real object, whereas the previous icon was one that I could easily visualize and feel with my hands without touching it.
The black and white icon in the forum logo looks the worst and more like three rivers on a land map than anything else. If I squint and visualize the shading, I can see what it should be, which makes me think that the shading is really the problem to me.
I lack the graphic design knowledge to really nail down what is so off-putting about it, but without some adjustments I think this is a downgrade. The purpose is solid though, and maybe there’s an explanation in there: in an attempt to maintain familiarity from the old, we took the old “clean” logo and messed it up to look like unrefined material instead of actually coming up with something unrefined from the start. Rather than having something natural, we have something malleated from an existing product. The leftovers from that refined product mar the attempt at something unrefined.
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The good news is that like everything else in Obsidian, it’s easy to customize and make it your own!
There are a few resources already available:
- Official logo customizer — at the bottom of this page you will find a customization tool that allows you to create your own color scheme
- Figma file — this community file contains variations on the logo that you can use and modify
- Various logos made by the Obsidian community can be found online
You can easily swap the logo on macOS/Windows/Linux (see instructions online for how to do this) and we’ll be adding a way to customize it on iOS from within the app. For Android there is already theming options built into the new icon.
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i agree, new logo is very very very ugly
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There is a reason I wanted to use obsidian in the first place, the old LOGO I think is cool, it will fascinate me
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I love it, great job!
You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
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Yes, thank goodness. Going to continue to swap to the old icon.
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Exactly! That’s what obsidian actually looks like!