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!