One of the ongoing challenges of my job here at Mozilla is trying to build up and engage our design community. After our t-shirt design contest earlier this year it’s definitely growing, but I’d love to see it get bigger.

Along those lines, an exciting recent development has been the work of Ricardo Meza and the folks at Mozilla México. They’ve started a contest to design their official logo, and so far the results have been extremely impressive. It’s awesome to see the community taking on a project like this.

The design portion of the contest runs until November 16, so definitely head over to their site and check out the entries so far (more than 100 already)…but be forewarned that they’ll probably all make you want to immediately head south of the border (or a whatever the appropriate direction if you live outside the US).

Thanks to Mozilla México for making this happen!

Way back in early June I put up a quick post announcing our plan to create a new and improved style guide for the Firefox logo. As I noted then, the goal is to refine our existing guidelines and communicate them to the widest possible audience. There are a lot of people around the world doing great work on projects that utilize the logo, and my hope is that this guide helps make them even more successful.

Since my initial post, Tara Shahian and I have been continuing to chip away at this…we gave a brief ‘lightning talk’ about it at the summit last month, and are now starting to work with the Royal Order on creating the actual guide. I really want this process to be as open as possible, so I’ll be blogging about some specific topics for discussion over the next couple of weeks. Once the site is ready we’ll initially release it as a beta to make sure everyone has a chance to make their voice heard.

Also, in response to my first post, Tara and I were able to assemble a great team of community members to serve as an informal advisory panel for this project. We’ve already gotten some helpful input from them, and I’m sure that will continue now that the project is really underway. So, without further ado, allow me to introduce the style guide team:
* Elise Allen - copywriter and frequent contributor to Mozilla marketing projects
* Percy Cabello - editor of mozillalinks.org and all-around Mozilla expert
* Jon Hicks - designer of the Firefox and Thunderbird logos
* Sean Martell - designer and illustrator who created Kit, among other things
* Brian Mills - interactive communications expert and veteran of many style guide projects

I’ll be posting more frequent updates about our progress soon. So, stay tuned for more, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

After my recent post about the Mozilla.com redesign, I figured it was time to go straight to the source. So, I chatted up the co-founder and creative director of the Royal Order, Tim Hogan, to get his take on the whole crazy process. (Incidentally, Tim was at the Summit, so if you were there you might recognize this guy)

Our conversation was held over IM a few weeks before the Summit. For Tim’s thoughts on designing in the open, differentiating Mozilla from the other guys and why he likes those dancing egg illustrations, read on:

First, a little background: tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be involved with Mozilla.

The Royal Order is a Chicago-based design boutique that was started in 2001 in the wake of the dot com bust. The core members of the team have been working together since the mid-nineties, and have been involved with design for the web literally since the beginning. We have always looked at design and marketing as a way to tell a good story, regardless of the medium, and we’ve been lucky enough to work with people and brands who think our approach matches their needs.

Through a somewhat convoluted chain of people and companies in the new media space, Mozilla first contacted us to bid on the Mozilla Store site redesign back in late 2006. If memory serves, I think it may have been someone at a former employer of yours…? [ed. note: Lisa Gansky. She rules.] Although disappointed that the project ended up going to another agency, we really liked what Mozilla stood for and felt we struck a connection with yourself and Paul. Toward the end of 2007 we were thrilled to receive the RFP for the Mozilla site redesign, and after several conversations were selected for the project.

It’s kind of hard to believe, but we’ve been working on this project together for about eight months now. Looking back, what were your expectations when we started and how did they compare to the actual process?
(Read on …)

I blogged about this a bit on Download Day, but now that enough time has passed to let it all sink in I’d like to take a more in-depth look at the redesigned Mozilla.com. Not only is it the primary means we have of distributing Firefox, but it’s also many people’s first exposure to the Mozilla Project in general…in other words, lots of ground to cover!

We started the redesign process last fall when, after a fairly exhaustive search to find the right design partner, we enlisted an agency out of Chicago called the Royal Order. Our joint goal was to create a site that promoted the awesomeness of Firefox 3 while also giving newcomers a feel for what Mozilla is all about.

With that in mind, this excerpt from the creative brief sums up our general approach pretty well:
“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.”

A quick side-by-side comparison of the old and new sites shows some obvious differences (imagery, font, colors, header bar) and also some similarities (big green download button, same rough page structure):

(click here to see a bigger version)

Of course, improvements to the font and header bar alone weren’t enough to convey any of Mozilla’s intangible qualities, so we added a couple of other elements to get the point across. For example, to emphasize the fact that Mozilla products are created by a collection of individuals we gave the site a subtle handmade feel as opposed to typical Web 2.0 slickness. Note the intentional rough edges, like the chunky edges to the blue background gradient, or the way every bracket and dividing line on the site has a wobbly pencil-drawn feel rather than a more typical pixel line:

The other key addition, of course, was the illustrations. After our early-stage round of public review, our big takeaway was that the site needed a central visual theme to tie everything together. It was agreed that illustrations would be a good way to go, and the Royal Order folks brought in the Delicious Design League, whose hand-drawn aesthetic worked well with the rest of the design.

We gave them the nearly impossible direction of “draw something that represents all the good things about the Internet”…luckily for us, they decided to not run screaming for the hills at that request, and then they proceeded to totally nail it. There’s plenty of fun discussion to be had about the meaning of balloons and trees, doves and pipes or UFOs and circuits, but to me all the elements from our initial conversations are in there…a sense of connectedness, potential, whimsy and optimism. Great stuff.

With the ‘hero’ illustrations out of the way, we also asked the Delicious Design League to tackle a number of more specific concepts. I was concerned that abstract ideas like accessibility or organic software might be impossible to communicate in a single drawing, but once again they blew me away:

And that’s the story of how dancing eggs, a walking fedora and a happy yeti became part of the Mozilla universe. Huge thanks to the Royal Order and Delicious Design League for their many contributions to this lengthy and complex project. A few more thoughts on other elements of the redesign coming soon…

Back from Whistler now, and after months of being focused on either the Firefox 3 launch or the Summit, it feels like things are very wide open and full of possibility.

I’ll be blogging about what’s coming next from our creative/branding/look&feel perspective soon, but for now let me say a huge thanks to everyone who helped make the Summit happen. Being able to meet, converse and socialize with co-workers and community members who previously were only names floating through my Bugzilla account was really special. Extra huge thanks are due to Dan Portillo, who I hope is relaxing on a beach (one where they don’t have rockslides) somewhere right now.

I took a bunch of photos during the week, but this one kind of sums it all up for me: