As noted yesterday, we’ve recently started planning a new look for Mozilla.com that will coincide with the release of Firefox 3. In the meantime, we’re still pushing forward with other, more incremental, improvements to the site.

The most visible of these interim site projects will be an updated homepage. The current page doesn’t provide much information about Mozilla as a whole (in fact, it’s almost indistinguishable from the Firefox product page), so we’re going to add points from our messaging document to provide a broader perspective.

Those points - security, customization and 100% organic software - will each be covered by a small promo slot that will link to a landing page with more detail. A fourth promo slot will link to a directory page containing details about the other *official* sites like the Developer Center, Spread Firefox, QMO, etc. Right now the site is lacking a central spot where users can access all these pages, so we hope this provides a better window into the Mozilla universe (and ideally inspires people to get involved in their area of interest).

There are some other cosmetic changes as well, but adding these key points and the directory page is the main difference. We still have some work to do on the landing pages, so this will go live sometime in December. The mockup below still needs a bit of tweaking to make it feel less busy and smooth out a few rough edges, but we’re making progress:

As our engineering and product teams move ever closer to the launch of Firefox 3, the marketing department is focusing on ways we can support the release. One of the biggest projects that we’ll be working on is a complete redesign of Mozilla.com.

Although the current site has served us very well in terms of driving lots of Firefox downloads, we still haven’t successfully used it to tell the story of what makes Mozilla so special. We want the new site to reflect Mozilla’s unique personality…that we’re a public benefit organization that relies on the active support of thousands of worldwide contributors to help keep the Internet open and free. Although readers of this blog surely know these details, this aspect of our brand hasn’t fully been communicated to the broad base of Firefox users.

It’s really a pretty amazing situation when you think about it: this unconventional arrangement has created a web browser that’s not only holding its own against the corporate giants, it’s used regularly by roughly 130 million people. How will we communicate all this? To be honest, I’m not sure yet but am looking forward to figuring it out together.

I should also make it clear that none of the branding stuff will get in the way of making the site extremely usable, accessible and localization-friendly…those are always top priorities. As a bit more background, here’s an excerpt from the project’s creative brief:

Unlike almost all other major tech companies, Mozilla is a people-powered, grassroots organization built by the contributions of community members around the world. The site design absolutely needs to embody our unique, unconventional and extremely un-corporate nature…while still being professional, informative and useful, of course.

Lastly, it should have a sense of fun and playfulness – we’re serious about what we do but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

We kicked off this project with an agency a few days ago…I’m planning on sharing some of the early creative direction and mockups as we go for your review and feedback, so stay tuned for much more on this topic.

(Coming tomorrow: a look at some proposed interim changes to the Mozilla.com homepage)

After many months of hard work by a variety of parties, the new Spread Firefox has finally arrived (in beta form…the full-on launch will follow before long). Although there’s still more to be done, we all feel like this is a big step forward for SFx and our open source marketing efforts.

The big change is that the new SFx is based around projects rather than blog posts, with the hope that this will inspire a lot of great ideas and collaboration among our worldwide community. Rhian has more details on how it all works.

Also, those of us in the Mozilla marketing department will soon be conducting the great majority of our business here…the goal being to be as open and transparent as possible. So, if you’re interested in what we’re working on - and even better, if you’re interested in helping out - stop by the new SFx regularly.

From a visual perspective, we tried to create an easily updatable, modular design that would support the projects concept as well as surface features like our events calendar, stats, user photos and more. The key challenge was structuring the site in a way that would expose as many different ways to get involved as possible. We worked primarily with Henry Brown, who did a nice job pulling all the disparate elements together without things getting too out of hand.

A mockup of the ‘non member’ state of the homepage is below (here’s the ‘returning member’ state)…both are slightly different from the live version, but we hope to get it all matched up soon. Lastly, if anyone knows how to get in touch with the two dudes featured at the top of the page, please let me know…we have some Firefox swag waiting for them!

As Andrew and Seth have already noted, Operation Firefox launched last month with a call for people to submit their plans to publicly display a Firefox Fathead sticker in the most interesting and eye-catching possible (legal) fashion.

We knew the success of this program would depend on whether or not people would rise to the challenge of coming up with great ideas and so far things are looking good: the initial phase of the contest ended last Friday, and we received a grand total of 3200 submissions. Very cool!

From a creative perspective, our goal was to create a website that would fire up people’s imaginations and inspire them to participate. This was a particularly fun project to brainstorm about, as we kicked around inspirational ideas ranging from James Bond to the A-Team. For the design, we turned to our friends at Nobox, and they made the astute call that site should resemble the secret hideout of an underground resistance movement rather than the slick style of a 007 HQ…hence the basement shadows and hand-sketched mission plans. It was also very important that every last bit of site text support this concept, so we worked with Elise Allen, who managed to incorporate influences from Fight Club to Flash Mobs into her copy.

The finalists have until December 3rd to execute their plans, and the winners will be announced shortly afterwards. All 50 Fatheads have been shipped to the finalists, so keep an eye out for giant Firefox logos popping up in strange locations over the next few weeks!