This has been quite a fun thread to read, as I've just come across it. 😀
Here are my brief thoughts on it. I was largely responsible for getting the old Mozilla icons done and approved, you can see the results of this work here: http://compendium.game-point.net/
During this design, we too went through a similar thread to this where there was lots of discussion on icon design. I'd make a couple of points about the current design:
- it is indeed recommended widely that you don't use text in an icon. At least, not more than 1 or 2 letters. I know DOSBOX is the name of an executable, but that's still text. IMHO, much better would be either a symbol of dosbox, or a letter or two.
- the curent icon is quite confusing and hard to read, for me. It isn't easy to read it as 'DOS BOX', if anything it's easier to read it as 'BOX DOS'. Sure, if you are used to it, or put some effort into it, you can read it correctly; but the point of an icon is to be very quickly recognisable.
I'm liking eobet's work here, especially the multicoloured icon. The TV screen looks very nice in the large format; unfortunately it's not so good when scaled down. It wouldn't work for 16x16. As for a symbol of DOSBOX, I'd personally go for the Z:\ prompt. Not a word, yet a widely-recognised symbol. If I was as good at graphics as eobet, I might try playing around with creating a multicoloured Z:\ prompt 😀 I think that could look gorgeous at high resolutions and scale well (with just that symbol) to 16x16.
The current icon is clear, but doesn't work at 16x16 (hence it has been laid out differently) and, IMHO, looks a bit amateurish. Almost as if a picture frame template had been used to create the sides of the box... not that I'm suggesting that. *ahem*! Ah well, keep up the good work everyone! 😀
PS. Oh, one last thing; when I'm alt-tabbing through windows and DOSbox is open, I realise there are 2 separate DOSbox windows; one for the video output and one for the status window. Currently they are distinguishable (in Windows), although I'm not sure if this is on purpose - the video output has the 16x16 icon resized and the status window has the proper 32x32 icon. Maybe it would be an idea to design a couple of overlays for the dosbox icon to indicate what window it represents? Perhaps reddish for output, yellow for status? Why? I just picked them randomly.
I told myself I wouldn't get into designing anything, but this is just to quickly represent my idea as it would look at 16x16 (the text would be more antialiased and detailed as you went higher in resolution, but the basic layout and design could be kept the same)...
Remember these are just quickly whipped up by me and could be made to look a lot better by someone with some graphics skill. 😀