The Firefox logo is obviously an extremely important element of the Mozilla universe and, like pretty much everything else we do, we try to make it as open and available as possible to the community. Of course, like a wise philosopher once said, with great power comes great responsibility, so today we launched a new and improved Firefox style guide to make sure the logo is always used consistently and correctly.

The goal of this guide is to present the longstanding guidelines from our trademark policy in a clear and easily understandable way to help our community continue to spread the word about Firefox around the world. There are already many people doing incredible things with the logo, and we want to give them the tools to be even more successful.

Our hope is that this guide will answer many of the commonly asked questions about how (and how not) to use the logo. We’ve also included a section where people can download the various configurations so there won’t be any confusion about what the *official* versions are.

I’m of the strong opinion that the way a style guide is presented (copywriting, graphics, etc) says as much about the brand as the guide’s actual content, so I should note that we attempted to do all this in a way that would feel appropriately Mozilla-ish (as opposed to creating an overly corporate and bureaucratic rule book).

As with all projects, this new style guide was the result of hard work from a lot of people. Big thanks are due to Tara Shahian for her invaluable help throughout (especially cleaning up our previous logo mess); Tim Hogan, Stephanie Bankhead and Aaron Shimer from the Royal Order for the web design, logo touchups and general advice; the Delicious Design League for contributing yet another awesome illustration (a gopher wearing Firefox gear…obviously); Steven Garrity and silverorange for the web dev; Stephen Donner for the QA; and of course Harvey Anderson and Catherine Brady for their wise legal counsel. I also owe a big shout-out to our community advisory panel of Elise Allen, Percy Cabello, Jon Hicks, Sean Martell and Brian Mills…their input was truly excellent.

One last note: we’re calling this style guide a beta launch for now because we want to make sure the community at large has a chance to review and weigh in before we officially declare it final. So, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments please let me or Tara know, or post your feedback on the Spread Firefox discussion page. Thanks!

This is awesome…the editing starting at about 1:30 into the clip is so good:

This is a few months old, apparently, but I just heard the about:robots song this morning and it totally made my day. I really can’t explain how happy it makes me when people take our stuff and put their own creative twists on it.

Check it out:
about:robots

(via Justin Dolske)

Visual design can be such a subjective thing that it’s always nice to get some quantifiable data that either validates your approach or suggests ways to improve.

Recently my esteemed colleague David Rolnitzky did a little number-crunching and found that the redesigned and reconfigured Firefox 3 first run page has so far been more enticing to visitors than its Firefox 2 counterpart. That’s good news, because as the initial page that new users encounter when they launch the browser, it’s an important one to our retention efforts.

Of course, most people who hit the first run page just want to get started with their browsing, but it also gives us a great opportunity to present the concept of add-ons (through our Get Personal page) or introduce them to interesting sites that show off Firefox 3’s capabilities (through our Getting Started page). The more familiar people become with these ideas, the more likely they are to become regular Firefox users.

The older version of the page was centered around providing some quick tips on how to use the most basic Firefox features (like tabs). From May 1 to June 16, 96% of the people who visited this page exited without clicking any additional links.

When we redesigned the page for Firefox 3, we worked with Mike Beltzner and the UX team on reconfiguring it so it would be less about the features and more about giving you a few simple options on things to do next. From June 16 to August 22, this version of the page saw 90.3% of the visitors exit, with 4.4% clicking Getting Started and 2% clicking ‘learn more’ to access Get Personal.

Although a ~6% improvement may not seem huge, when you consider that millions download Firefox and visit this page every month, that’s actually hundreds of thousands of additional people who’ve been introduced to useful concepts like add-ons.

So where do we go from here? We have further site optimization ideas in the works for the rest of the year, so stay tuned for details on how we’ll be continuing to refine this and other key pages on Mozilla.com. And if you have suggestions of your own, please don’t hesitate to let any of us know.

It’s been well-documented that this year’s Mozilla Summit was a fairly eventful week, what with a highway-blocking rock slide, bear sightings and a half-day power outage on top of the talks, sessions, ping pong games, dinners, etc.

At the suggestion of Deb Richardson, we decided to immortalize the various dramas by turning them into a laptop sticker. Tim Hogan from the Royal Order was there to experience it all firsthand and was kind enough to translate the excitement into the artwork below (based, of course, on the original design by Nobox).

So, if you did indeed survive the Summit you should be getting one of these in the mail sometime in the next few weeks:

Big news in the browser world this week with the release of Google Chrome (the comic book was a very nice touch, btw).

There are plenty of people way more qualified than I to discuss the various implications of Chrome, so I’ll spare you any serious commentary. But, as a proud Gen Xer I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least point out the logo’s resemblance to an old childhood favorite: