Brands are fundamentally very abstract things…they exist in people’s heads more than they do in any well-designed logo or fancy style guide. On his new Brand Tags site, Noah Brier starts with this notion and adds the Web 2.0-ish twist of letting people tag various brands with whatever attributes they see fit. It’s really a pretty fascinating experiment.

Of course, maybe I just like the site because Firefox comes across well…the Firefox Brand Tag page is dominated by generally positive associations, like “Internet”, “browser” and, my personal favorite, “awesome.” On the flip side, Internet Explorer doesn’t fare as well.

My only quibble with the site is that I’d love to somehow know more about the demographics of the people doing the tagging - obviously this is a fairly narrow sample so it’d be interesting to know who they are, exactly. Overall though, it’s an awesome site - and don’t miss Celeb Tags if you’re feeling a little more lighthearted.

(Thanks to Asa for the heads up on the link.)

Last fall, I did a short blog post about how we created a “Powered by Mozilla” logo for use by organizations whose products are based on Mozilla technology, and was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest that it received. The only problem was that my original post left pretty much all of the key details, like what it actually means to be “powered by”, unresolved.

We haven’t forgotten about this, though, and lately Harvey Anderson, Paul Kim, Tiffney Mortensen and I have been working on an initial framework of how the “powered by” program might work. Tiffney has a much more thorough explanation of our thoughts so far over at her blog, but the general idea is to set some basic criteria for whether or not a product is truly powered by Mozilla, and then let the community enforce (for lack of a better word) these standards. We very much want this to be a community project, and broad participation is essential to making it work.

Our thoughts so far are definitely just a first step, and we’re counting on community participation to refine and improve them. For lots more info on all this, plus some suggestions on how you can get involved, be sure to check out Tiffney’s post on the subject.

They don’t make ads like they used to, that’s for sure.

It’s been awhile since I blogged about the Mozilla.com site redesign, so it feels like time for an update on our recent progress. In order to provide some context, I’ll also take a step back and give a little background about the process and how we’ve approached this project.

First, why redesign Mozilla.com?
* To support the Firefox 3 release…we did the same for the launch of versions 1.5 and 2.0.
* To provide new and improved content about both Firefox and Mozilla.
* To make sure the site continues to evolve and improve along with our organization, our expanding userbase and the Mozilla Project as a whole.

The process so far:
* September 2007: We began soliciting internal suggestions for design agencies.
* October 2007: We sent RFPs (requests for proposals) to six agencies that seemed like good potential fits.
* November 2007: Based on their design abilities, understanding of our brand and history of working on sites with heavy community involvement, we selected the Royal Order and immediately began giving them massive amounts of background info about Mozilla.
* December 2007: The Royal Order created a detailed information architecture plan and did some initial design exploration.
* January 2008: Worked with the Royal Order to refine the design direction; they began designing the site in earnest.

Design background:
The overall design goal is that the site should embody Mozilla’s unique nature, while still being very usable, informative, etc (read more about our design objectives). Having said that, it’s also important that the design not overshadow the key content goals of driving Firefox downloads and educating people about Mozilla. Plus, the site also needs to be easily localized, highly accessible and compliant with Web standards.

After sifting through people’s reactions to the initial design explorations, Paul and I realized that, although the basic layouts were quite solid, they were still lacking a main visual element that met the above design goals. Specifically, we decided that using photography as the main element would make it too difficult to fully represent the global scope of Mozilla, so we and the Royal Order began to focus on illustration options instead.

With regard to illustration style, we wanted hand-created elements rather than slick, vector art in order to represent the fact that Mozilla software is created by a community of people around the world rather being than a faceless corporate entity. The Royal Order recommended an illustration studio called the Delicious Design League, whose style really complemented this concept, and things began to come together.

Our somewhat ambitious goal for the illustrations was that they should abstractly reflect the good things about the Web itself…things like connectivity, collaboration, creativity, etc. That’s certainly not an easy task, but the designers and illustrators have come up with several different concepts - all based around metaphors for networks - that support this really well. The final site will incorporate a few of these, one of which is shown below.

This mockup of the homepage will still receive a few more tweaks before it’s all said and done, but it’s a good sneak peak of what’s to come. As noted earlier, the illustration of the tree is meant to suggest the power and possibility of the Web, as well as the way Mozilla works. And the various handmade elements, such as the pencil-drawn lines and background shadings are all meant to evoke the grassroots, people-powered nature of Mozilla itself.

What next?
The design work is still in progress, and we’re busy creating some cool new content like a detailed Firefox features page. From there, we move on to development with our friends at silverorange (who have been closely involved in the entire process), localization (for more on this, definitely check out Pascal’s recent post on the subject) and QA - all with the goal having the site ready for the upcoming Firefox 3 launch.

There’s still lots more work to be done, and I’ll have plenty more to say about the design and the specifics of the new site later. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!

As noted in an earlier post, we’ve coined the term “100% organic software” to help explain Mozilla to people who don’t know what open source is or might not understand why a small public benefit organization is competing with some of the world’s richest and most powerful companies.

This term is very much aimed at a broader audience that probably doesn’t understand the history and nuances of the Mozilla Project, so we like the idea of using a simple, non-technical concept to convey something that’s actually quite complex. If the browsers made by our corporate competitors are like food from factory farms, it’s easy to imagine Firefox as the organic equivalent…tastier, more nutritious, and ultimately better for the world at large.

Of course, the bottom line is that people usually choose Firefox because it’s a better browser rather than because of our unconventional structure, so we’re not planning on making ‘100% organic’ our primary promotional focus. But, from a branding perspective I think it’s important for people to understand what Mozilla is all about, and how that plays a key role in making Firefox the way it is. The browser market will only get more intense, so it’s important for us to establish a clear identity…cool new features are easily copied, but I don’t see our competitors becoming open source, non-profit organizations any time soon.

To help flesh our this concept, we’ve created a new landing page on Mozilla.com. It’s currently linked to from some new banner ads, and will also be referenced on the soon-to-be live updated homepage when it’s ready. Here’s a quick screen shot, but if you’re interested it’s definitely worth checking out the full page too:

As our engineering and product teams move ever closer to the launch of Firefox 3, the marketing department is focusing on ways we can support the release. One of the biggest projects that we’ll be working on is a complete redesign of Mozilla.com.

Although the current site has served us very well in terms of driving lots of Firefox downloads, we still haven’t successfully used it to tell the story of what makes Mozilla so special. We want the new site to reflect Mozilla’s unique personality…that we’re a public benefit organization that relies on the active support of thousands of worldwide contributors to help keep the Internet open and free. Although readers of this blog surely know these details, this aspect of our brand hasn’t fully been communicated to the broad base of Firefox users.

It’s really a pretty amazing situation when you think about it: this unconventional arrangement has created a web browser that’s not only holding its own against the corporate giants, it’s used regularly by roughly 130 million people. How will we communicate all this? To be honest, I’m not sure yet but am looking forward to figuring it out together.

I should also make it clear that none of the branding stuff will get in the way of making the site extremely usable, accessible and localization-friendly…those are always top priorities. As a bit more background, here’s an excerpt from the project’s creative brief:

Unlike almost all other major tech companies, Mozilla is a people-powered, grassroots organization built by the contributions of community members around the world. The site design absolutely needs to embody our unique, unconventional and extremely un-corporate nature…while still being professional, informative and useful, of course.

Lastly, it should have a sense of fun and playfulness – we’re serious about what we do but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

We kicked off this project with an agency a few days ago…I’m planning on sharing some of the early creative direction and mockups as we go for your review and feedback, so stay tuned for much more on this topic.

(Coming tomorrow: a look at some proposed interim changes to the Mozilla.com homepage)

At John Lilly’s request, we’ve created a new “Powered by Mozilla” logo. The idea is that companies that use Mozilla technology as the basis for what they do would proudly display this logo on their sites (or wherever it’s most relevant).

I’m happy about this because I think it will do two good things for our brand: 1) help differentiate Mozilla from Firefox (among the broader audience, there’s still some confusion around this) and 2) further establish us as an organization working on the cutting edge of a lot of cool new technology (again, beyond just being “the Firefox guys”).

Thanks to Alicia Patterson for putting this together for us.

Every major Firefox update is referred to by a code name during its pre-release period. The names come from major parks around the world…Firefox 1.5 was Deer Park, Firefox 2 was Bon Echo, and Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso.

Gran Paradiso is well underway, of course, so it’s time to give it a visual identity of its own (for comparison, here’s the Bon Echo identity). The name evokes images of travel from an earlier, more glamorous era so we decided to center our campaign around a vintage travel theme.

The first step was to bring our fictional place called Gran Paradiso to life in the form of a poster by artist Steve Forney. The final art is below (makes Gran Paradiso look like a pretty pleasant place to hang out, if you ask me)…we’ve printed up posters, created desktop wallpaper and are planning other surprises for the next few months.

One really important thing to keep in mind is that this is strictly an internal campaign, meaning it’s purely for the enjoyment of everyone in the Mozilla community who’s working on the Gran Paradiso project. It’s most definitely not intended to be promotional or customer-facing in any way.

So, without further ado, welcome to Gran Paradiso (click for a larger image):

Lately I’ve been working with Jay Patel and the good folks on the Mozilla QA team on developing a brand identity for their soon-to-be-redesigned quality.mozilla.org (QMO) site. Like all Mozilla projects, QMO depends heavily on community involvement, so we thought it would be appropriate to put the final decision in your hands. In other words, it’s voting time.

So, if you feel like making your voice heard, click here and vote!

To get you in the right frame of mind, here are the options. Each option contains a logo, as well as two secondary elements that will be used elsewhere on the site (and possibly on other stuff like t-shirts, etc):

Option 1:

Option 2:

Lastly, thanks to Rubber Design for creating these options (as well as plenty of other good ones that didn’t make the final cut).

There’s a new Mozilla blog in town…the Mozilla Blog. To quote the blog itself, it’ll be “a 360 degree look at the goings-on within the Mozilla community, including news, opinions, events, tips & tricks and more.”

From a design perspective, we tried to integrate the blog pretty closely with the existing look at Mozilla.com. I see those blue & orange gradients as a strong online brand element for us, so it made sense to keep them going here. We wanted it to have a distinctly “by the people” feel, so each post will be accompanied by a little avatar representing the poster. Hopefully that will give it a nice, friendly look, especially as the photos build up over time.

My esteemed colleague Mary Colvig will be the blog’s editor, and it should have some good stuff in it. Also, thanks to Boris Anthony for bringing his WordPress skills to this project.