PlanetsCentral

That's probably more a matter of taste because I consider the forum icons one of the better-looking part of the site :-) But its entirely possible that the visibility depends on your monitor. I'm not sure whether adding more colors would work; I don't want this to look like an angry fruit salad.

I originally tried using different colors for the balloons (yellow vs. white). This is how other forum skins solve it (e.g. at CircusMaximus). However, personally I found that confusing because I never know which are the new ones. [...]

Big ones for comparison:

Yeah fruitsalad is lame (some are tasty though). I am totally with you there. :D

About the monitorguess I think that's not the problem here. The marker is way better to see than let's say google adds. It simply slipped through my personal (brainmade) objectfilters until yesterday.

Maybe the assymetric thing does work. I can't imagine how that would look like. Another way might be to simply make the unread symbol bigger. I guess that's also a very intuitive way.