intothefuzz

If I know one thing about the Mozilla community it’s that people love t-shirts. So, I’m very excited about today’s launch of the Mozilla Community Store, which opens up our t-shirt creative process in some very cool ways.

Tara Shahian has all the details over on MusingT, but the gist of it is that now you don’t need to wait for us to produce a shirt you like. Instead, you can create you own design inspired by Firefox (or Thunderbird, Camino, etc) and upload it to the Store’s public gallery where you or anyone else can purchase it in a variety of different colors and shirt styles. Or, you can just browse through other people’s designs in the gallery – we already have 60 up there now and hope to have many more soon.

Looking at the bigger picture, this is a huge step towards Tara’s and my longer term goal of organizing and expanding the Mozilla visual design community. There are already plenty of people out there doing Firefox-related design – just look at the 3,500 people who participated in our t-shirt contest or all the fan art floating around the Web – but there’s also so much untapped potential just waiting to be harnessed. I’ll be blogging about our vision for this much more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

The successful launch of the Community Store was due to a lot of people’s hard work over the last few months, but in particular I’d like to thank Ryan Doherty, Alex Buchanan and Mike Morgan from our amazing WebDev team (those guys can build anything), IT mastermind Aravind Gottipati, legal guru Catherine Brady, Stephen “Eagle Eye” Donner from QA and our PR goddess, Melissa Shapiro. And extra special props are due to Tara, who oversaw the entire process from start to finish (she did the visual design, too). When she and I originally had the idea for this store last spring we envisioned it as a fairly simple thing, but under her guidance it’s turned into something much bigger and cooler than I’d imagined. It’s very rewarding to work with such a talented group of people.

Lastly, as a bonus for you having slogged through this entire post, I should mention that there’s currently an introductory discount of 20% available…just enter coupon code MOZILLAMERCH at checkout (more details). Happy shopping!