The designer Stephen Horlander recently created a concept rendering of an updated Firefox icon. Stephen has been a long time member of the Mozilla community and has contributed his design talent to the Firefox 1 theme, the ubiquitous Web Feed icon, and the Firefox 3 OS X theme.
Similar to the ongoing iterations, the design is partially based on a conceptual sketch by Jon Hicks. Here is his description of the conceptual rendering:
"I think fur texture is an important thing to have since the two best ways I see to freshen the icon (without losing the essence of it) are dimension and texture. I guess what I had in mind was less overall pseudo realistic fur texture and more selective enhancement. It's hard to verbalize so I worked up what I had in mind. Basically select patches of sharp, long, subtle (maybe too subtle?) fur. Some on the tufts on his face, some around the arm area, some on the upper and lower half of where his body curves. Much like in Jon's original concepts."
There are definitely some aspects of this conceptual design that I think we will want to leverage in the updated icon for Firefox 3.5. As always comments and feedback are welcome and stay tuned for regular updates throughout the week.