intothefuzz

By now, you’ve probably read all about Download Day, our community-powered effort to set a Guinness World Record for Firefox 3 downloads. Very cool stuff.

When Mary and I were brainstorming potential design directions for the Download Day site, we were particularly inspired by the global pledge map (for example, if you’re curious about how many people in Liechtenstein plan on helping set the record, now it’s easy to find out). That sort of friendly competition between nations led us to the Olympics, and since we’re big fans of the art deco style, we decided the design should harken back to the look of vintage Olympics in particular. Coincidentally, that theme is a nice tie-in to the Gran Paradiso artwork, which was also done as an art deco homage.

We worked with Nobox (designers of the Firefox 3 robot, Operation Firefox and the Mozilla Store, among many others) to create the site, and as always they did a great job executing (and improving) on the ideas in our original design brief. The site’s header is particularly reminiscent of that classic style we were going for:

Another one of my favorite Download Day design elements is the globe shown below (this is the ‘before’ version…people who participate in Download Day will see an even cooler ‘after’ version, but I don’t want to ruin that surprise). It has an art deco feel too, but also reminds me a bit of the Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair:

If you’re into this design style, I should also mention that there’s a nice series of Download Day buttons and banners you can put on your own site to help spread the word. And don’t forget to make your pledge today!

From today’s Mozilla Store photo shoot:

(photo by David Rolnitzky; painting by Emanuel Leutze)

I can’t stop watching this:

Asa tipped me off to this interesting post by Isriya Paireepairit in which Isriya notes certain similarities between the Firefox 3 robot and one featured in Coldplay’s “Talk” video. Funny stuff.

I’ll go on record, though, as saying that our badass open source robot could beat up Coldplay’s wimpy soft rock robot any day. Chris Martin, if you’re up for the challenge you know where to find me.

Dealing with phone companies, insurance companies, banks, etc has caused most of us to become so accustomed to terrible customer service that when someone actually does it well it feels like a tremendous breath of fresh air…something worth shouting about, even. So, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I just had one of the best customer service experiences of my life with Dreamhost, the service that hosts this very blog. I’d been having some weird technical issues, and not only were they friendly, human and fast in their responses, they went way above and beyond the call of duty to get everything straightened out for me. So, if you’re ever in need of a hosting service for your site, definitely check these guys out. They’re great.

Like they say, customer service is the new marketing. I don’t think that’s necessarily a ‘new’ development, but otherwise this blog post is definitely proving that point.

Rhian stopped by the other day to show off Austin, the first baby ever born to a (female) Mozilla employee. Kind of a cool milestone for the company…

Brands are fundamentally very abstract things…they exist in people’s heads more than they do in any well-designed logo or fancy style guide. On his new Brand Tags site, Noah Brier starts with this notion and adds the Web 2.0-ish twist of letting people tag various brands with whatever attributes they see fit. It’s really a pretty fascinating experiment.

Of course, maybe I just like the site because Firefox comes across well…the Firefox Brand Tag page is dominated by generally positive associations, like “Internet”, “browser” and, my personal favorite, “awesome.” On the flip side, Internet Explorer doesn’t fare as well.

My only quibble with the site is that I’d love to somehow know more about the demographics of the people doing the tagging – obviously this is a fairly narrow sample so it’d be interesting to know who they are, exactly. Overall though, it’s an awesome site – and don’t miss Celeb Tags if you’re feeling a little more lighthearted.

(Thanks to Asa for the heads up on the link.)

Anyone who spends more than about 10 minutes around me these days knows that I’m totally obsessed with the Wire. If it’s not the greatest TV show ever, it’s certainly on a very short list. So, pardon the diversion from Mozilla-related topics for a minute…

My wife and I recently finished watching the Wire’s final season, and during the letdown period that inevitably follows the end of anything really good, it struck me that what the world really needs is a way of determining who is the toughest and most bad-ass of all the characters on that show. After all, there was a lot of ‘muscle’ on the Wire, but if they battled it out, who would win?

Purely for my own amusement, I’ve concocted a March Madness-style bracket of the Elite Eight of the Wire’s tough guys. After a highly unscientific seeding process, here’s how the first round matchups break down:

1. Omar Little
8. Michael Lee

2. Chris Partlow
7. Snoop Pearson

3. Wee-Bey Brice
6. Slim Charles

4. Brother Mouzone
5. Sergei Malatov

Any thoughts on how things play out from here? Let me know in the comments section…