Windows: a taskbar-specific app icon instead of the downscaled iOS artwork

[jokaperes]

Problem

On Windows, the production app icon (assets/prod/t3-black-windows.ico) is rendered from the iOS artwork (assets/prod/black-ios-1024.png). That artwork is drawn for the iOS home screen, with a beveled edge, a gradient on the wordmark and wide margins. At taskbar sizes (24 px at 100% scaling, 36 px at 150%) that design causes three problems:

• The bevel turns into a blurry rim.
• The bottom of the "3" fades to gray.
• The black tile merges into the dark Windows 11 taskbar.

So on the taskbar the icon reads as a dark box with small letters. The ICO already has all seven frames (16 to 256 px), so the cause is the artwork, not missing sizes.

Real Windows 11 taskbar (dark theme, 100% scaling), zoomed 4×:

Proposal

A separate source artwork used only for the production Windows ICO:

• the same T3 wordmark path, scaled up to fill more of the tile
• a flat #111 tile with a subtle #666 border, so it stays visible on a dark taskbar
• no bevel or gradient

macOS, iOS, Android, web, and the dev and nightly channels keep their current artwork. The brand exporter would use this source for production Windows, so regenerating icons keeps it.

The comparison below uses the real ICO frames: the current one from main, and the proposed one from #23102. Each image shows the 24 px frame at 100% and the 48 px frame scaled to 36 px at 150%, on the Windows 11 dark (#202020) and light (#F3F3F3) taskbar colors, zoomed 3× without smoothing. These are composites of the actual frames, not screenshots of a rebuilt app.

Taskbar	Current	Proposed
Dark
Light

Questions for maintainers

1. Do you want a Windows-specific icon at all, or should every platform keep the same artwork?
2. If yes, is this direction OK (larger wordmark, flat tile, thin border)? Or would you rather supply the artwork yourselves?

If you approve a direction, I'll open a fresh PR that links here. It will include screenshots of a rebuilt, installed app on a real taskbar at 100% and 150%, in light and dark themes.

Related

• fix(desktop): improve Windows taskbar icon legibility #23102: PR with this artwork, closed because the design had no prior maintainer approval. This discussion asks for that approval first.