intothefuzz

Work on the Mozilla Creative Collective has shifted from creating the logo to designing the website, and once again we need your help. The initial mockup from the design wizards at Airbag Industries is below…take a look and let us know what you think via the comments section here, by tweeting or blogging about it, or by whatever other mode of self-expression you favor.

As a quick recap, the Creative Collective will be the online home for Mozilla’s visual design community. Users will be able to upload their Mozilla-inspired artwork into a publicly-viewable gallery and participate in design challenges on specific topics (with the winner determined by a public vote). That’s just scratching the surface, really…for a much more in-depth breakdown, check out the project’s wiki page.

A big source of inspiration for the site design was the logo itself, as Airbag incorporated its colors, style and major elements whenever possible. They also made an effort to evoke the feel of other Mozilla sites (especially mozilla.com and QMO), resulting in subtle textures, rough edges and a generally open, handmade feel. As always, the goal is to reflect Mozilla’s “people-powered” essence rather than creating something slick and corporate.

We tried to structure the homepage so it would show off as much community artwork as possible, and provide interesting ways for people to get involved or connect with other designers. Here’s a quick rundown of the key elements:
* header featuring the logo, project name and basic nav (note: this area will be smaller on the drill-down pages).
* main area of the site focuses on promoting the current design challenge and showing off a slideshow of particularly interesting recent images (challenge winners, staff favorites, etc).
* smaller mini-gallery of “hot” designs that have been favorited by the community.
* recent imagery from designers you’re following (if you’re signed in), plus a news feed of relevant blog posts.

It probably goes without saying, but all specific text and imagery in this mockup is totally placeholder and will change for the final release. So, with that in mind, what do you think? Does the site make you want to get involved? Will it appeal to designers? Does it communicate the basic concept of the project? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts…

(View the full-size version on Flickr.)

New beta, new robot (and he’s getting faster and faster):

Thanks to Josh Burcham for another cool illustration in our ongoing series.

Tara and I haven’t blogged about the Community Store much lately, but the inventory there just keeps quietly growing and growing: as of today it offers 114 different Mozilla-themed shirts for sale. That’s a pretty impressive number when you think about it!

Most of the new shirts (we had around 60 when we launched late last year) feature Firefox-inspired artwork contributed by our design community, but we’ve also seeded it with logos from other Mozilla projects, such as Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird and SUMO. The idea is to be as participatory as possible, and to make sure the store has something for everyone.

So, if you’re planning on doing some shopping to round out your summer wardrobe, check out the selection in the Community Store (fashion experts are telling me that Mozilla shirts will be the hot beachwear item this year). And if you don’t see something you like, please add your own design!

Big thanks to everyone who’s contributed a design so far. Here are some of the recent ones:

Information superhighway.

On that note (no pun intended), this is a really cool post about how the song was constructed.

I recently had the honor of giving an online talk about open source design as part of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge (which in turn is part of their Concept Series). It covers a lot of the same topics that I’ve been blogging about lately (how community participation can help with the design process, organizing the Creative Collective, etc) so I figured I’d share it here.

By the way, the rest of the tutorials are really great so if you’re at all interested I highly recommend checking them out. The other tutors are some seriously smart, innovative and interesting people – Atul Varma, Aza Raskin, Alex Faaborg, Jono DiCarlo, Mike Beltzner, Myk Melez, Madhava Enros, Wei Zhou – so it was a huge honor to be included in that crowd. Big thanks to Pascal Finette for putting it all together.

Here’s the video…pardon the occasional audio problems (Planet Mozilla readers, the video is here):

(I gave a slightly different and longer version of this talk at FOSDEM and the ENSCI design school in Paris earlier this year…if you just can’t get enough of this topic, or want to hear the French perspective on it, here’s the audio of the ENSCI discussion.)