Name and mark
The name
zot + Look.
The obvious part first: zot for Zotero, Look for Quick Look — the system preview the plugin drives rather than replaces. The name says what the plugin does and claims nothing beyond it.
It also names the line it stands in. Mikko Rönkkö’s ZoteroQuickLook brought the preview to Zotero 4–6, Guillaume Chapron’s Zotero7QuickLook to Zotero 7. Both names were taken, and reusing either would have caused confusion — the more so because the plugins install side by side. Shortening to zotLook keeps the descent legible without treading on anyone. See Origins.
A coincidence across two languages
Found afterwards rather than intended: zot is a word. In Mauritian, Seychellois and Guianese Creole it is the third- and second-person plural pronoun — “they, them” and “you, y’all” — from French les autres and vous autres, the initial /z/ carried over from the liaison with the word before it.
“zot look” reads as “they look” — but only by taking one word from each language. Look is English; in Mauritian Creole the verb is gete, and the sentence would be “zot gete”.
So it is not a Creole phrase but a meeting of two languages. Found, not made — and too pleasing to leave out.
The plugin ID is zotlook@fre.ms.
The mark
A contact sheet: a 4 × 4 grid of page thumbnails, ten of them marked in the three highlight colours, and together they form a Z.
The choice is not arbitrary. The contact sheet is the one thing this plugin builds that no file manager hands you, so the mark shows what it contributes rather than only what it depends on. And the Z answers the question about Zotero without borrowing a line of its logo.
Why it works without colour
The letter is carried by marked against unmarked, not by hue. It therefore survives greyscale, a dark background and colour blindness alike. For the same reason the six unmarked tiles stay pale rather than dropping out — they are the ground the Z is read against.
Why every size is drawn separately
Not scaled from one file, but each on its own pixel grid:
| Size | for |
|---|---|
| 24 px | the preferences sidebar — Zotero’s stylesheet puts #prefs-navigation>richlistitem image at that width |
| 32 px | the add-ons list |
| 96 px | that same list on a 2× display |
Only at 96 px is there room for the outlines and the suggested lines of text. Below it they close up into grey, so there the unmarked tiles are a flat pale fill.
Why it carries its own colour
Zotero’s own sidebar icons are single-colour SVGs tinted through -moz-context-properties, and they turn white on the selected row like everything else. Copying that would have been the tidier answer.
Gecko, however, resolves context-fill only for images from chrome: and resource: URIs, and a plugin’s icon comes out of its XPI: there would have been nothing to paint with. So the mark brings its own colour, which at least keeps it legible against the accent background instead of letting it vanish into it.