The roads I take...

While the SeaMonkey project itself has proven itself as a mature community that can do quite well, and we even get better and better with our migration to the "new toolkit", some code parts lag a bit behind, like those targeted by my bug bounty program. But there are also other areas that need help, one of which is artwork.

There's a long-standing open bug report around on one area where we badly would need someone to help us out: we need new icons for all our application windows.

This might sound like an easy task, but there's quite some rules to follow, which makes this hard work - and we need a bit over a dozen different icons!
Those are the requirements we have for those icon designs:

• We need to replace all icons we have that contain "window" in their name, see our Windows icon collection for what those are and their current versions (still those made a long time ago for the Mozilla suite).
• The new icons need to make clear at the first glance that they are SeaMonkey icons, so they should visually refer to the SeaMonkey logo in some way.
• Similar to that, the icons need to be consistent enough to each other in style and basic look, so that a user sees at the first glance that all those windows belong together.
• At the same time, the icons need to be distinct enough that a user does not mistake one of them for another and they need to clearly enough identify the purpose of the window they label.
• The icon designs also need to fit in with the new icons in the reworked default theme of SeaMonkey 2 (trunk nightlies), so a look similar to those new icons is preferred.
• We need all those icons in different size and color depth variations, at least 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 and 128x128 with 24bit RGB and 8bit alpha (i.e. 32bit RGBA) as well as 1-bit-transparent versions with 24bit RGB colors, 256 colors (custom palette) and 16 colors (standard EGA palette), all for the 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 sizes.
• We need to get all those single images in PNG format, additionally providing a Windows .ico would be nice but is not strictly required. We need to create icon versions that fit for Windows, OS/2, Mac and GTK2, but once we have the raw images to use for those, it's just technical work to produce the correct file formats from them.
• Due to size constraints, it might be a good idea to have minimalized shapes for the 16x16 versions that might look a bit different than the respective bigger icon sizes, just like the current icon set (see above link) has. That current set is a good example for everything we need, actually - just that it still is based on the old Mozilla suite "m" logo and the old "Classic" theme imagery, which both are gone in SeaMonkey 2.
• Last but not least, all the copyrights for all imagery must be assigned to the SeaMonkey Project / Mozilla Foundation (per at least an email from the creator to the Mozilla licensing group and the SeaMonkey Council - Mozilla may additionally require you to send a signed assignment message per paper mail), we'll then set them under the MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license with committing them to the source code repository.

If those requirements don't intimidate you and you feel you have enough artistic talent and icon design knowledge as well as want to contribute some work to the SeaMonkey project, then please create some preview designs (a selection of icons, including at least browser and mail in 16x16 and 32x32 versions), post them as an image somewhere publicly on the web and inform us in the SeaMonkey development newsgroup/mailing list!
Once we arrive at a design we all like, it'll be time to work on the full set and go to the bug report, but before that, the newsgroup is a better idea.

Oh, and if you need a SVG version of our logo to work on such icon designs, please contact me at kairo-at-kairo-dot-at or on IRC - we're still waiting on getting a trademark policy up before we will publicly put up such a SVG image.

I know the target for such icons is pretty high, but I hope we'll get someone to provide them and vastly improve the look of SeaMonkey 2