Introducing the New & Improved Firefox Logo Style Guide
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!
September 26th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
It looks awesome! Pleasure working with you on this.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Something’s funky with the high-res images…
EG: on http://www.mozilla.com/img/tignish/about/logo/download/logo-only.png
The dropshadow seems to be pixelated along a 5×5 grid.
September 26th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Looks great John.
One thing I’d like to see, perhaps on the “responsible use” page, is a note on updating the old 1.0 logo with the new logo, and how to tell the difference. It seems like more news articles and sites use the old logo than the new one.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Peter Parker’s uncle was a wise philosopher ?-)
September 27th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I understand that we have to protect our trademark, but I also find it a little disconcerting to see community generated artwork with a large X over it. Of course I’m looking at this from the perspective of trying to figure out how we can attract more designers into our community, as opposed to how we can maintain control over our ability to go after malicious copies of Firefox (which means we have to actively show we are protecting our logo).
Is there some middle ground? Some way we could instruct people that they are encouraged to create derivative work but they have to [idea here]? Some way we could enable and encourage this type of design work without losing control of our own logo?
September 29th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Thanks, all, for the comments. Some specific thoughts:
@Dolske – will check into this, thanks.
@Fligtar – great idea. We’ll definitely add this to the next iteration of the guide.
@Alex – good thoughts. Building our design community is one of my top goals for the next six months, and I sincerely hope that this guide facilitates that as opposed to being any sort of discouraging force. Future versions of the guide will likely have more positive examples of community art as references, and Tara and I are working on a larger program to get more designers involved in Mozilla. Stay tuned for more about that soon…
September 30th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I was going to ask “Please forgive my ignorance, but where is the guide?” but then I re-read it and spotted the link.
Just a small advice, feel free to ignore: Could you add a subtle underline of links on your blog, or maybe change the color slightly? I’m not sure if it’s just my poor screen, but I can barely see links on your blog without hovering over them with the mouse. A nice trick if you don’t like the traditional underline look of links: a:link {border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc}. Cheers!
October 24th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
ps2 games…
Playing video games can also give you many new friendss…