intothefuzz

The new Mozilla Messaging site went live today, and I really like the way it turned out. I can say that without bragging because I had *absolutely* nothing to do with it…it was managed by Messaging’s Rafael Ebron and the Spread Thunderbird crew, with design from the Royal Order and implementation by silverorange.

I’m impressed with how they took the existing architecture and certain other elements (header, fonts, etc) from Mozilla.com and created something new. There are enough similarities to establish the close connection to other Mozilla sites, but it also has its own unique visual identity. Plus, I love the ‘city of the future’ illustrations…definitely looks like a place I’d want to visit.

Kudos to all who contributed!

I realized the other night that I recently passed an interesting (note: interesting to me only) personal milestone: the two-year anniversary of my Delicious account.

From my initial tagging of an Arkansas Razorbacks news site to my most recent tagging of a book about vintage WPA-era posters, Delicious has been an amazing repository of every little twist and turn of my web surfing. At 1,269 links (and counting) I haven’t yet become a true Delicious jedi (see: pkim), but I’ve saved enough stuff that at this point my account functions as a backup brain of sorts. That comes in very handy.

Anyway, it’s made me a more effective web surfer and is truly one of my favorite things about the Internet. Thanks Delicious!

Time for a quick update about a couple of projects I’ve blogged about recently:

Lizard Feeder
As noted in the original post, the deadline for your data visualization ideas, concepts, mock-ups, etc is this Friday (February 20). Yesterday, Dave shared the work that’s been done so far, so definitely check that out if you missed it…as always it’s quite amazing/inspiring to see what people come up with.

If you’re interested in contributing, we’d love to hear your thoughts…just head over to the bug and share your thoughts. And if you need any direction, I’d suggest keeping these points in mind:

1. Activity – the visualization should really show off the constant activity within the Mozilla community. Something very static probably won’t work.
2. Simplicity – with so much data available, it’s certainly possible to do something incredibly complex. However, we’d like this to be understandable at a quick glance.

Ping me or Dave if you have any questions. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Creative Collective
Work on the Creative Collective is continuing to roll along. As noted earlier, I did some speaking on this topic while in Europe last week and was encouraged by people’s reactions. Tara and I are currently working with Airbag Industries to scope out the details so the design work can begin…on that note, if you have any thoughts on the current project overview, please let me know.

Also, we’re sorting out a few options for the MCC logo. Whatever we end up doing, we’re going to make it as open a process as possible, so stay tuned for details. Lastly, if you’re interested in following the project a little more closely or even joining in at some point, allow me to suggest signing up for the design community mailing list one more time.

I was in Brussels last weekend for my first-ever trip to FOSDEM and thoroughly enjoyed the experience from start to finish…big thanks to the Mozilla folks and other conference organizers who made it happen.

The best part for me was meeting lots of people from our European community and getting to witness firsthand the tremendous energy that they bring to the equation. The conference room was packed, the merch table was swarmed and the level of enthusiasm was high throughout.

I gave a talk about the Mozilla Creative Collective, and also participated (along with William, Jane and Barbara) in an open session about Mozilla marketing. That was a big highlight…FOSDEM is a developer’s conference, obviously, but the session was well-attended and it was great to hear people’s ideas, answer their questions and get a fuller understanding of their dedication.

Good times all around. Also, for anyone who’s interested, I’ve posted some pictures from the weekend as well as the slides from my Creative Collective talk (although my presentation style largely involves putting up a picture and talking about it, so some of the slides won’t make a huge amount of sense without the voiceover).

I’m very excited to be making my first-ever trip to FOSDEM later this week. I’m heading to Brussels to meet as many people as possible from our European community, and to give a talk about community design and the whole Mozilla Creative Collective concept that I blogged about yesterday.

Big thanks to Brian, Axel, Chris and Paul for letting me crash what is usually a developers’ party…although I’ll almost surely be the least technically adept person in the entire building, I’ll try my best to follow along and not unplug anything important.

I’m also going to spend a couple of days at the Mozilla Europe office in Paris and will be giving a similar talk at the ENSCI design school there. Many thanks to William for setting that up.

So, if you’re going to be in Paris or Brussels over the next few days, definitely stop by and say hi! I’m looking forward to meeting you.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, building up Mozilla’s visual design community is one of my (and Tara’s) top priorities for 2009. There are already designers out there doing good work, of course, but the larger scale possibilities are nearly limitless if we get more organized and continue to bring more people into the fold.

With that in mind, I’m excited to announce the Mozilla Creative Collective. The idea is to build on what we started with past projects like the Firefox 3 T-shirt Contest and the Community Store by creating an online hub where our community activity can take place.

In some ways this is inspired by the concept behind wartime propaganda posters (although I should be clear that this is neither war nor propaganda): using widely distributed and well-made art to convey a message. In this case, we want to make it possible for people to cover the web with art inspired by Firefox (and other Mozilla products). We also want to create an online social environment where designers and non-designers alike can connect and collaborate in a positive, communal atmosphere.

Right now we’re still in the planning stages and are dreaming big. One way we want to encourage participation is by building in functionality that allows for regular design challenges. For example, we might issue a challenge to create art that represents Firefox’s speed, with the ‘winner’ to be determined by the ratings provided by others in the community.

Another component would be a job board of sorts, where non-designers can request design work for their Mozilla projects. The idea is that a student in India who’s hosting a download party at his college’s computer lab could request a design for a promotional flyer and have it be created by someone in, say, Poland. Then, that design could be posted publicly and be reused by community members for their own campaigns.

You can read more details about our plan on its wiki page. It’s ambitious and will be a lot of work, but should be a fun process. We’ve enlisted Airbag Industries to help us design the site, and of course the amazing Mozilla Web Dev team has proven time and time again that they can build literally anything that we can dream up.

Lastly, if you like the sound of this and want to be more involved with the Mozilla visual design community, I highly recommend signing up for our mailing list or following us on Twitter. I’ll be blogging more about this project, of course, but the list is a good way to stay very up-to-date on all the latest happenings.

That’s it for now…more to come!