…and they’ve chosen Moises Lara as the winner of Mozilla México’s logo design contest. In addition to being a very cool logo (I love the Aztec-ish interpretation of the Mozilla dino), it’s a great example of what’s possible when we harness the power of our design community. Kudos to Moises, Mozilla México and everyone who voted for making it happen.

The term ‘community’ gets thrown around a lot at Mozilla, and with good reason: the community really is Mozilla. Without it we never would have built a browser that went from zero to 20% worldwide marketshare in just four years, we never would have served up one billion add-on downloads and we never would have set a world record with the Firefox 3 launch (among many other accomplishments).

So, following the successful examples of our developers, localizers, marketers, QA testers, etc we’re going to be making a major push to organize and grow our visual design community. I’ll share more details soon - including our plans to create a new site for posting and sharing your artwork - but if you’re curious to learn more the first thing to do is sign up for our new design mailing list.

Of course, there already is a Mozilla design community - just look at the 3,500+ people who participated in our Firefox 3 t-shirt contest or Google around for Firefox art - but there’s so much more that can be done. This is an entirely new way we can put our greatest advantage to good use, and we should get a lot of cool stuff to look at, too. The possibilities are incredibly exciting.

In the meantime, here’s that mailing list link again (we promise not to spam you!). More to come…

There’s some amazing stuff happening in our worldwide design community…like the ongoing Mozilla México logo contest, for example. Last summer, Ricardo Meza and his team of volunteers put out a call to local designers to see who could create the best logo for their corner of the Mozilla universe, and they ended up getting 281 entries from 156 different designers.

The best thing is that nearly all of those 281 entries are really good. It’s inspiring to see our community produce work of this quality, and makes me excited to roll out some similar initiatives that Tara and I are planning on a global scale next year.

In the meantime, you can help Mozilla México out by going to their site and casting your vote for which of the eight finalists should become their *official* logo. The voting area is over in the right sidebar, and will be open until December 16 (with the winner being announced on December 20).

Thanks to Mozilla México for opening up their process and making this happen!

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!

Like a lot of people, I’ve followed U.S. politics pretty obsessively over the past year or so (and in various intense bursts before that), but I’ve tried not to write about it here because a) I want this blog to mainly focus on topics more closely related to Mozilla and b) once I start ranting I have a tendency not to be able to stop.

But, when I saw Barack Obama’s change.gov site last week I had to post a quick comment. It’s been well-documented that his team did an absolutely masterful job of using social media and the full array of Web 2.0 tools to create an entirely new sort of 21st century campaign, and now they’re applying this same approach to his presidential transition efforts. Very cool.

(Side note: I’d love to know when exactly they started building this site…it popped up a couple of days after the election, but I know from personal experience that sites of this quality and scope don’t exactly spring up overnight.)

Anyway, I’m hopeful that Obama and his team will continue this approach once they actually start governing. This could be a truly revolutionary step forward for both the Internet and American politics…Joe Trippi, the pioneer of online grassroots political organizing, says that such a move would make this the most powerful presidency since FDR.

There actually is a slight Mozilla angle to all of this. Never before has there been such a high-profile example of what a well-organized community of people can accomplish. I think having this grassroots/’power to the people’ feeling out there in the zeitgeist will only mean good things for us as we try to spread the word about our own community and its work.

A few weeks ago, Tara mentioned that we’re open-sourcing our t-shirt process in the form of the soon-to-be-live Mozilla Community Store. The basic concept is that anyone will be able to design a Mozilla t-shirt and both order it for themselves and make it publicly available for others to buy. I’ve always been impressed by our community’s creativity, so our hope is that over time we’ll build up quite a collection of designs.

We’ve already seeded the new store with 40+ of our favorite designs from last spring’s Firefox 3 t-shirt contest and our amazing Web Dev and QA teams are in the process of getting it ready for launch. Should be good.

The exact go-live date is still being determined, but in the meantime here are a couple of pictures for your enjoyment:

(Thanks to Bret, Ryan, Melissa, Juan and Amie for striking the poses, and to David for his expert photography skills.)

Some seasonal cleverness sent to us by a Firefox fan in Canada:

One of the ongoing challenges of my job here at Mozilla is trying to build up and engage our design community. After our t-shirt design contest earlier this year it’s definitely growing, but I’d love to see it get bigger.

Along those lines, an exciting recent development has been the work of Ricardo Meza and the folks at Mozilla México. They’ve started a contest to design their official logo, and so far the results have been extremely impressive. It’s awesome to see the community taking on a project like this.

The design portion of the contest runs until November 16, so definitely head over to their site and check out the entries so far (more than 100 already)…but be forewarned that they’ll probably all make you want to immediately head south of the border (or a whatever the appropriate direction if you live outside the US).

Thanks to Mozilla México for making this happen!