Announcing the Mozilla Creative Collective
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!
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Really exciting stuff, looking forward to tackling the challenges up ahead, and making this “dream” a reality!
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
>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)
of course the visual design of soviet constructivist propaganda does seem to work incredibly well: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/06/creative-commies.html
having contests based on different eras of graphic design might be a lot of fun.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:06 am
@Alex – that’s a fantastic idea…we’ll definitely have to do that once we get the site up & running. And I LOVE the constructivist style, so that might have to be the first era we try…
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
With the recent release of the Mozilla Community Sites (MCS), it would be great to link to the future MCC site.
Also, the MCS needs a favicon. I think this would be a great post for the “job board” idea. We’re not in a rush for the favicon, so when the community gets up and running, this could be one early project, if you’d like.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
[...] not quite done yet. As you may know, one of my (and John’s) top priorities is to build up the visual design community and encourage more participation in every step of our design process. So with that in mind, [...]
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:13 pm
[...] 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 [...]
February 6th, 2009 at 11:07 am
[...] code. There are also many activities going on that go beyond products and code, including design, education and [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 9:27 am
[...] gave a talk about the Mozilla Creative Collective, and also participated (along with William, Jane and Barbara) in an open session about Mozilla [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
[...] will be helping build our marketing and design communities through Spread Firefox and the Mozilla Creative Collective, but surely other interesting things will crop up along the way (maybe something like this past [...]
March 6th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
[...] on the Mozilla Creative Collective site is coming along well…Tara, Ryan and I have been working with the team at Airbag [...]
March 27th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] Mozilla Creative Collective is a newish project designed to organize and grow our budding visual design community. When the site launches later [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
[...] been blogging about the Mozilla Creative Collective for a long time now, and am very happy to report that we’re on the verge of getting the actual site up and [...]