Mozilla is getting a new brand look.

“It’s about time!”

“Didn’t you already do that?”

“It’s not broken, so why fix it?”

When Mozillians hear that we’re updating the Mozilla brand identity, they respond with enthusiasm, impatience and confusion in equal measure. A brand identity –  logo, tone, tagline, typeface  – isn’t something to be trifled with, especially with a brand as well respected as Mozilla.

Here’s what’s happening.

Back in late 2014, the creative team began working on a new look for Mozilla, a so-called living logo. The graphic heartbeat of this logo came from real-time data about our engagement with the world. Having a brand identity that reflected the daily number of Bugzilla requests, Mozilla contributors, and Firefox users, for instance, was a brilliant idea. Except that, in the end, it couldn’t be made to work. Chalk that experience up to good learning.

Fast forward to today. As you heard Chris say onstage in Orlando, our mission and vision are now clearer and stronger than before. We’ve built  a new brand position for Mozilla: being a true personal advocate for online life. We promise to advocate for people both within their online experience and on their behalf for the health of the Internet.

From that solid foundation, we’re ready to explore how our brand will look and sound in the world, reinforcing what we believe and what we can deliver. A 2016 goal for Mozilla is to Grow Our Influence in the world, and a new identity will make it easier.

Why are we doing this now?

Brands need to evolve to stay relevant. Introducing a refreshed identity will be a milestone for Mozilla, will provide a new badge of belonging to our movement, and will help tell the world what we stand for. When more people grok our mission, they will want to walk shoulder to shoulder with us and contribute more. Yes!

The need for a new Mozilla identity is also long overdue (see posts below). The  word “Mozilla” and a handful of muted colors are no match for modern communication. Lacking an icon to represent our brand in social media, for instance, we have shown up as a heart, a whimsical unicorn, and even a famous candy. (Mozilla melts in your mouth, not in your hands?) Our whole organization, especially our Mozilla global communities, is eager for direction and a bigger toolkit of creative assets.

Like everything at Mozilla, this will be open source, including:

  • An invitation to contribute. If you have an idea for what the Mozilla brand identity should look like, please write to me, send me a sketch or shoot a video. We’ll formalize design challenges through our Community Design github repo as well.
  • A Brand Advisory Group. Made up of a cross-section of Mozillians, this group will bring different viewpoints and expertise to the table as we review our work in progress.
  • Access to working documents. Those who are interested and disclosed will be invited to view strategy, positioning, and briefing docs not available publicly.

What’s next?

We’re now selecting an agency partner for this work. Following a few rounds of creative review (highlights posted here), we hope to have a new Mozilla identity defined and ready to share later this year.

Oh, and we’re also starting to think about the Firefox identity. But that will have to wait for our next post.

Meanwhile, the comments box awaits your cursor.

 

Say Hello!

Firefox has a new feature called Firefox Hello, an easy video conversation tool that’s built into the browser. This feature is a bit different than other typical browser features. People have built companies around similar technology and we think the underlying technology that powers Hello has the same potential. It’s called WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication) and has become a standard in all modern browsers today.

The easiest way to connect for free over video.

The really interesting part of the Firefox Hello product launch was that we gradually rolled it out to various locales over a period of about two months. For all those different stages, we created various marketing materials, including four videos.

The main product video was also localized into several languages for key markets, making each one a unique, standalone product. A BIG shout out to our l10n team for the localizing and for generally being awesome.

Your design, printed on our next T-shirt!

(crossposted from the Mozilla Add-ons Blog)

Screenshot 2015-03-23 16.27.34

Mozillians love their t-shirts. And Firefox users love their add-ons. Add-ons let you completely customize your browser, from the way it looks to the way it behaves. To celebrate the community of add-on developers from all over the world who make this possible, we’re creating limited-edition t-shirts to send as thank-you gifts.

To make this celebration more participatory, we are taking submissions for the design. If you’d like the chance to have your artwork featured on this special shirt, please submit a design!

THEMES

Your design should be an artistic representation of the following themes, so be creative! (Your artwork should not be a reinterpretation or alteration of a Mozilla or Firefox logo, although an original representation of a fox or red panda would be ok.) Branding will be added to the back or arm of the t-shirt by our Creative staff.

  • Personalization — a browsing experience unique to you
  • Openness — anyone can make an add-on and there are thousands to choose from
  • Productivity — be more productive by customizing your browser to help you work better

Here are some resources to help:

REQUIREMENTS

  • Artwork must be submitted in EPS (vector art) format – if file size is over 10MB, please upload to Dropbox and send a link
  • Email your submission, along with your name or alias, to amo-tshirt-contest@mozilla.com

If you have a particular t-shirt color in mind, please include it in your email as well. We can’t guarantee it will be printed on a shirt of that color, but it will help to know what the artist intended. Limit 3 designs per entrant.

DESIGN SELECTION

  • A panel of judges will select three designs, and community voting will decide the final design.
  • The judges will consider:
    • How well the design represents the contest themes
    • Visual appeal
    • Uniqueness
    • Whether the design would look good on a t-shirt
  • The judges are:

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Deadline: submit your design by Thursday, April 30, 2015 at 11:59PM Pacific Standard Time
  • Finalists announcement: the three finalists will be announced on or about May 18, 2015
  • Community vote: community voting will close on or about June 2, 2015
  • T-shirt printing: t-shirts bearing the winning design will be printed on or about June 23, 2015

FINE PRINT

Employees of Mozilla are not eligible to participate.

All designs submitted must be your own work. Do not include artwork or logos belonging to others.

Your designs remain your exclusive property. By submitting a design, you grant Mozilla, and its designees, the right to edit, publish, copy, display, and distribute your design, alone and in combination with other material, without compensation. This includes, but is not limited to, displaying your design on a website for public voting, and reproduction on t-shirts for distribution.

Your designs may not: (i) contain vulgar, offensive, obscene, lewd, or indecent language, behavior or imagery; (ii) defame, libel or otherwise violate the rights of any third party; (iii) violate or facilitate the violation of any federal, state or local laws or ordinances; or (iv) target anyone because of his or her membership in a certain social group, including race, gender, color, religion, belief, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender identity, or political affiliation, or contain a symbolic representation of any group that targets anyone because of his or her membership in a certain social group. Designs that are, in Mozilla’s sole opinion, inappropriate, objectionable, harmful, inconsistent with our image, or otherwise not in compliance with these rules, may be disqualified, and we may remove any design that has been posted for any of these reasons.

All designs that are uploaded and made available for viewing by the general public will be deemed posted at the direction of the person who submitted the design within the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Communications Decency Act.

The designs selected by the judges will be posted on a website and the community will be invited to vote for the best design. The design receiving the most votes will be the one that Mozilla uses on the limited edition Add-ons t-shirt. If there is a tie in the community voting, the judges will select the overall winner.

We ask that you not employ any means that is inconsistent with getting an honest picture of the community’s genuine opinion of your design to obtain votes. Examples of inappropriate activities include automated reviews, use of contest services, payoffs or promises to others in exchange for votes.

Any personal information you provide in connection with your participation in this project will be used only for purposes relating to this project, and will not be communicated to third-parties without prior permission or as otherwise specified in our Privacy Policy located at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy.

You agree to hold harmless Mozilla, its officers, directors, employees, divisions, affiliates, and subsidiaries, from any claim by any third party relating to any intellectual property or other rights in the design you submitted.

Design a T-shirt for Mozilla QA

(crossposted from our QA blog)

Attention visual designers! Are you interested in contributing to Mozilla QA? Design a T-shirt for Mozilla’s Quality Assurance (QA) team!

At Mozilla QA, we work with our community members to drive software quality assurance activities across Mozilla. We play a key role in releasing a diverse range of software products on schedule.

The Mozilla QA team at a Work Week in July 2014.

The Mozilla QA team at a Work Week in July 2014. Photo credit: Mozilla.

Continue reading …

​Announcing the Mozilla Digital Asset Management (DAM) System

Last year, the IT team, Creative team and Barry Munsterteiger partnered to find and implement a solution that would make storing and sharing digital assets within Mozilla simple and centralized. After looking at several solutions, we settled on a Digital Asset Management System powered by NetXposure.

Over the past several months, we’ve been working closely with NetX to launch three initial Mozilla portals: Creative Assets (assets.mozilla.org – replacing previous assets.m.o), Firefox OS Partners (replacing Box.com) and Community Events (events.mozilla.org – includes Events team & Reps assets). These portals will host all of our visual assets from the past, present and future, including logos, videos, Web designs, print designs, campaign-specific designs, gear and everything in between.

dam1

On Wednesday, March 11 at 9 AM PT, Ty Flanagan from the Creative team will tell you a little more about the DAM system, show you how to download assets and then answer your questions on IRC in #fistbump (Creative team channel). You can also submit questions ahead of time on Moderator. Check out the demo here. The demo will be recorded and posted for you to watch later, in case you can’t make it to the live session.

We hope to see you there!

Finding Creative Assets in the DAM (Public Portal)

Accessing files in the DAM is simple. You can search for a specific item:

Dam2

Or you can easily browse all of the public files in the DAM, using the menu at the left or by clicking the folder icons:

Dam3

Then download your asset with the click of a button:

Dam4

Building a Living Logo from Community Data: a Rough Working Prototype

The core component of our MozID project is a new “living logo” for Mozilla – one that is directly shaped by the activity of our community and evolves over time based on that activity. We’ve shared some examples of other living logos, and reported that we’re working with Pitch Interactive to build that data visualization, but the concept can still be a little abstract until you see it.

The good news is that now we have a rough working prototype that allows you to do just that.

To be clear, this does NOT at all represent how the final logo will look, but the prototype really does bring the idea to life in a much more significant way. First, check out this short video that gives some background explanation:

The prototype itself lets you take straightforward information about community activity (sourced from areweamillionyet.org) and turn them into a logo-ish shape. First, adjust details like opacity, shape of the curves or the particular sources of the data, then click the ‘transform’ link to see them all come together.

Here’s the prototype.

Our logo will be much more visually refined and styled than this, but it’s pretty eye-opening to see it all come together…especially considering that it will be a constantly shifting representation of the heart of Mozilla. I’m really excited about that part in particular.

Stay tuned for more details on this project coming soon!

Logo Survey Results

As I mentioned last week, one of the ultimate goals of our MozID project (including the logo, but not limited to it) is to create design assets and materials that will help Mozillians everywhere communicate more effectively. To that end, it’s incredibly important that we understand how people use what’s available now and what they really need going forward so we can work towards solutions that will be meaningful.

To begin that conversation, we asked for input via a brief survey, and the results are very interesting. Here are a few topline takeaways:

* 91% of respondents have a Mozillians profile; people were pretty evenly distributed around the world.
* 61% currently get design information & assets from the Mozilla Style Guide.
* 82% of people would find easily available visual assets to be helpful.
* 62% would be likely to use an online tool to create their own customized logos.
* 83% would use the new Mozilla logo or a version of it customized for their own communities.
* 12% would prefer their existing community logo.
* Common use cases include websites, t-shirts, event materials and other swag.

If you’d like to dig in deeper, the full set of results is available here.

This has been helpful to me, because one of our ideas is to create an online tool that would allow Mozillians to create their own custom versions of the new logo. We’re not sure how that would work yet – perhaps it would be based strictly on that user’s data, or perhaps there would be more direct opportunities to directly tweak the details to fit your preferences, or perhaps both – but it does seem like there’s interest in such a thing. I know there are some really good community specific logos out there (Mozilla Mexico has one of my favorites, for example), and we want to be sensitive to that legacy, but if we could create a system that would feel both standardized across Mozilla and also unique to each individual or local community that would be really cool.

Many thanks to the 600+ people who responded to our survey. We’ll be asking follow-up questions AND sharing some design ideas soon…watch this space for details!

Creating the New Mozilla Logo – We Need YOUR Help

Every interaction people have with Mozilla is an opportunity to help them understand who we are and why our mission matters. To make the most of these moments, we’re creating a new Mozilla logo that will represent our values and help communicate the story of our brand. (If you’re new to this project I recommend reading the overview and a couple of earlier blog posts to get caught up on the strategy.)

Of course, an essential element of this brand story is the open source philosophy that Mozilla is built on. We know that projects are improved by participation and transparency, so it’s of the utmost importance that any effort to visually represent what we stand for include the community every step of the way. This logo will belong to all Mozillians, and its creation process must reflect that.

We’ve been posting updates during the early concepting phase, and will share more specific ideas for your feedback as things take shape. But before then, I do have one very important ask for everyone reading this: please give us your input on what you’d like to get out of this process.

I’ve put together a quick survey that will help us understand how the new logo will be used, and what the Mozilla community’s visual identity needs are. It will only take a few minutes to complete, and the information will be invaluable to making sure we’re providing the right solutions to the right problems.

Here’s that survey link again: please take it!

We’ve put together a short video to provide additional perspective on why community participation is so crucial to the success of this logo project:

You don’t have to a designer or a branding expert to participate in this. All input is helpful, and all ideas are appreciated. This logo will belong to all of us…let’s make it awesome together!