intothefuzz

The Creative Collective’s latest design challenge – “Create the Official Mozilla 2010 T-Shirt” – has been running for a few weeks now, but there’s still plenty of time to add your contribution to the mix if you haven’t done so already. But where to begin? How is even possible to sum up Mozilla in a single t-shirt?

Here are a few tips:

1. You don’t have to use the dino head. Although the Mozilla dino is undoubtedly awesome, the creative possibilities will really open up if you look beyond the logo and explore the main themes of the challenge. There are plenty of Mozilla-related concepts, of course, but for starters the creative brief calls out openness, innovation and community. That’s certainly fertile ground for interesting ideas…the more abstract, the better.

As a relevant example, when we did the Firefox 3 t-shirt contest a couple of years ago, we got a ton of interesting designs that used the Firefox logo, but the winner was the one that went a step beyond and found a clever way to convey a broader theme (in that case, community).

2. If you must use the dino head, do it in an interesting way. In other words, think about how you can integrate it into a design that conveys the key themes mentioned above rather than just sticking the logo in the middle of the shirt and then designing around it. For example, Rogelio Calamaya, the winner of our Five Years of Firefox challenge, has submitted a design that uses the dino head, but only as one part of a larger scene. Cool stuff.

Also, it’s worth noting that our trademark policy prevents us from accepting a design that modifies the dino in any way (such as changing the color, distorting the various elements, etc). If that seems too limiting, definitely refer to point #1!

3. Avoid text! The Mozilla community is very global and includes speakers of pretty much every language, so creating a shirt with a lot of English (or any other language) isn’t a great way of celebrating that. Plus, t-shirts are a visual medium so think in terms of pictures to look at rather than words to read.

4. Remember that this challenge is about Mozilla, not Firefox (or any other specific product). We’ve already done a couple of Firefox-related challenges, and surely will do more in the future, but this one is all about Mozilla. So, make sure your design focuses on those Mozilla qualities of openness, innovation and community rather than any particular product or product logo.

5. Abstract is better than literal. Just to hammer home the first point a bit more, the name of the game is creativity, so ponder the themes, search around for inspiration and see where your muse takes you. Push yourself a bit…awesomeness awaits!

The design challenge ends on April 30, so put on your thinking caps. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

This post has been localized into Belorussian, thanks to PC

If you’re a graphic designer looking to get involved with Mozilla, here’s an excellent opportunity: the Mozilla Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina needs a new logo and has launched a contest in conjunction with the Creative Collective to help make it happen.

Kerim Kalamujic has posted the details (and relevant source files) on the Mozilla BiH site, so be sure to check that out if you’re interested. And if you’re not local, I’d suggest doing a little research before you start designing to make sure you capture the right flavor.

The chosen logo will be used in a wide variety of places, so this is a great chance to make a huge impact on the look & feel of one of our most active communities. Submissions are due March 15th…looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

*This is crossposted from the Mozilla Blog. I’d also like to give a huge thanks to Mike Morgan, Ryan Snyder and Craig Cook from WebDev; Krupa, Stephen, Raymond, Vishal, Milos and TMZ from QA; and Tara Shahian and Jeff Zeller from Marketing. They all did amazing work in putting this together really smoothly and efficiently.*

We just launched a big new feature on the Mozilla Creative Collective: design challenges. The idea is to give our creative community the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to Mozilla by focusing everyone’s efforts on a particular topic. We’ll be hosting these design challenges roughly once a month, and we’re kicking things off with Firefox Goes Mobile.

The goal of the Firefox Goes Mobile challenge is to create the official promotional emblem of the mobile version of Firefox (which is getting closer and closer to release). The winning image will be used on everything from websites like mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org to schwag like t-shirts and stickers, so if you’re a designer it’s a great way to get involved and make a big impact on a really important project.

To sum up, we’re asking you to abstractly represent mobile-themed concepts like convenience, connectivity and innovation in a simple, yet easily understandable graphic…basically telling the mobile story with a single image. Not an easy task, but of course that’s why it’s called a challenge! There are more details about what we’re looking for on the Firefox Goes Mobile page, so if you’re thinking about getting involved definitely read through those first.

The submission period lasts until September 30th (with voting extended through October 7th)…we can’t wait to see what the Mozilla community comes up with!

It’s an exciting day for our visual design community!

First, we launched the next phase of our partnership with Infectious: a design challenge based around the theme of technology making people’s lives better. Or, as they put it, “People and Robots: Best Friends Forever“. Past Infectious challenges have produced some great work, so I can’t wait to see what comes as a result of this one.

Stay tuned for more updates on the challenge, and definitely submit your own stuff if you’re feeling inspired (the grand prize is $1000 + other goodies). If the challenge submissions make me half as happy as this promo graphic it’ll definitely be a big success:

(Site note: any resemblance the above graphic and this cereal box is more than coincidental.)

Also, we also took a big step towards launching the Mozilla Creative Collective by unveiling the new creative.mozilla.org site. It mostly just features placeholder content for now, but this is where the MCC will live and it’s a nice hint at what the final site will look like.

Speaking of the Creative Collective, our fearless Web Dev leader Mike Morgan is on the case, and we’re moving full speed ahead towards a beta launch in early August, with more features coming soon after that. In addition to the contributions from Mike and his team, Tara Shahian and Jeff Zeller are currently plowing through the endless list of details that accompany a site release, and it’s exciting to see the progress being made.

One of our big pre-launch tasks involves bringing in as much of the existing Firefox-inspired community art (like these wallpapers) that we can, so if you have anything you’d like to be included in the beta launch please contact me directly.

So, to sum up, there’s lots of good stuff happening in the world of Mozilla design (and I haven’t even mentioned all the activity happening with Personas). More coming soon!

Yesterday we launched a new marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla…the idea being to open our process to the community and see who can come up with the best idea for increasing the Firefox user retention rate. Our crowdsourcing efforts in the past have always produced good results, so I’m really interested to see what people come up with this time.

When it came time to create the Impact Mozilla site, we worked with the same team who helped us with Operation Firefox – the Nobox design agency and copywriter Elise Allen. Like with Operation Firefox, the site is set up like a little world within your computer, but the trick this time was to balance that sense of whimsy with the more serious nature of this contest.

In the end, we went with a whiteboard theme that’s meant to conjure images of conference rooms and brainstorming sessions and took some direct inspiration from the casual feel of Mozilla’s HQ in Mountain View:

And the final site:

Thanks to everyone who helped out with the design portion of this project: Ken Kovash, Seth Bindernagel, Tara Shahian (who took the photos above), Laura Mesa and Blake Cutler (plus Nobox, Elise and Steven Garrity, of course). And if you have any ideas about how to impact Mozilla, send ‘em in!

Our recently completed Firefox 3 T-shirt Design Contest was one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on since joining Mozilla…it was tremendously gratifying to turn our brand marks over to the community and see so much creativity and enthusiasm in return. Out of the many truly excellent submissions we received, though, the work of Tracie Andrews (aka “egirluk”) really stood out, so it was no surprise when one of her designs was voted the overwhelming contest winner.

I recently emailed Tracie a few questions to find out more about her background, inspirations and approach to the contest. Here’s what she had to say:

1. How did you originally get interested in design?
I’ve always loved art and computers, and always wanted to combine the two. I did a Fine Art degree in 1998 but didn’t get my first computer until 2000. It was then that I discovered a magazine dedicated to digital arts, and that was it. I still dabble with paint and canvas from time to time, but I much prefer what I do now. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

2. How long have you ben designing professionally? What kinds of work do you specialize in?
It’s only been recently in the last few months that I have started designing professionally, and I specialise mainly in illustration and graphic design.

3. How would you describe your style? What are your influences?
To be honest, I don’t have a style – I prefer not to be constrained by that limitation. I’m continually learning and evolving as a designer and I think that is reflected in my work. To me the subject matter/brief dictates the style, not the other way around. As for influences, I’m influenced by everything! TV, cartoons, books, news, fabrics, ads, packaging – everything, I’m always looking at things and seeing the creative aspect!

4. What’s your creative process like? When you found out about the t-shirt contest, how did you approach the work?
When faced with a brief, I like to research everything about the project. Once I have all the information, then I can proceed with sketches and then start work on the computer. I always leave colour choices until last. When I found out about the contest, I searched for everything I could about Firefox and Mozilla, its history, and manifesto. Once I had that information, the designs sort of came together themselves!

5. You were one of the most prolific designers in the entire contest. Of all the designs you submitted, which was your personal favorite and why?
Thank you! My personal favourite was laptop-design. With each design I tried to push them as far as they could go, without losing the ‘message’ (I wasn’t always successful!). This particular design is my favourite because it incorporates all the things I love about Firefox, particularly how Firefox can be customized to each user, so my browser is as unique as I am!

6. Lastly, what’s your favorite thing about Firefox?
Lots of things! I love the customisation aspect, the add-ons and extensions, so I can tailor my browser to my needs. I love the tabs, which makes everything so easier, no more having lots of windows open. And, the fact that the software is relatively small, never crashes and is unobtrusive – oh, and if my operating system does crash, the ‘restore session’ is invaluable.

***
Tracie’s winning shirt will be available in the Mozilla Store in the next few weeks. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the contest, and stay tuned for more info on how we’d like to “open source” the rest of the design submissions to make them more widely available.

Adding more open source flavor to our design process is one of my top goals, so I’m excited to announce that we launched the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Contest today.

Our challenge to the Mozilla community (and beyond) is to create the coolest, most interesting Firefox 3-inspired t-shirt design (if you need inspiration, here’s some info on suggested themes). The winner will be determined by a public vote and will have his/her work sold in the Mozilla Store as our official Firefox 3 t-shirt (note: all Store proceeds benefit the Mozilla Foundation).

With Operation Firefox last fall, there were some complaints that it wasn’t international enough (due to some legal restrictions around liability issues), so we took that feedback and made sure the t-shirt contest would be more globally accessible. We’re excited to see the range of styles we get as a result.

There are plenty of other details to cover, but rather than list them all here I’ll just direct you to the official contest page set up on Spread Firefox by Tara Shahian. It should answer most questions, but definitely let us know if there’s anything we missed. The key thing to know for now is that design submissions are due on March 16th, so get those creative juices flowing and send us your best stuff!

Last month I announced an impromptu contest to see who could come up with the best interpretation of the Firefox 3 Beta 2 ‘robot’ artwork. I have to say, I was both surprised by and impressed with the volume and creativity of your comments. There were certainly a lot of great ones.

It took me a little longer than planned to determine the winners, but I’m pleased to report that after much careful deliberation, I have the results. Before I go any further, though, let me make it clear that these are not the “right” answers. There is no single “right” answer…it’s all just a matter of highly subjective interpretation, and these were the three that struck me the most (and won the t-shirts).

The “Extremely Thorough Analysis” award goes to Lim Chee Aun:
“The robot doesn’t seem like a bad guy. It’s actually a good guy! It’s beaming up the Firefox logo in the sky, just like in the Batman movies! It’ll fight off all the bad guys with its powerful boxing gloves and could run super fast like Flash (notice the Flash superhero symbol on the ears?). It’s built to be tough against any attacks, bugs and even evil UFO’s that shoot down buildings. ‘The world needs Firefox 3!’ The robot’s antenna (on the head) shall spread the news through all forms of telecommunication. Though it’s getting dark (notice the dark background and the sun sets), the robot shall not rest and will always fight till the end! Firefox rules!”

The “Should Have Been the Sequel to ‘the Matrix’” award goes to Lachlan:
“This is of course a picture taken at the mighty Firefox take over in 2011, Giant Robots will be built from rival software developers to destroy the Mozilla headquarters, but of course, the robots discover the power of their programs and preach holograms of Firefox and Thunderbird logos! Reminding the world to switch.”

The “Abstract Art Interpretation” award goes to Veekay:
“Well, here goes my thoughts… The robot is FF3 ! And the buildings are actually IE – look at the three buildings that look prominently – thats the ‘E’ lying down and the ‘I’ had already fled the place fearing the UFO’s that are the bugs that hit you hard due to non-standard HTML done by ‘IE’ gurus”

Thanks to everybody who participated…this was a lot of fun. And will we see the robot again in the future? Stay tuned!

Goal: Create a first run page for the latest Firefox 3 beta that would be eye-catching enough to make people stop and explore ways they can provide feedback.

Solution: A giant robot, of course.

Your Challenge: Answer the unanswered questions…who is behind this rampaging robot? Are the UFO’s in the background working with or against it? What’s the significance of it all? Post your theories in the comments section – the best one gets a Firefox t-shirt.

Thanks to Nobox for getting in touch with their inner sci-fi geeks and creating the very cool art for this page.

**Update**
The informal contest is now over (details here)…thanks to everyone who submitted their theories. I’ve been really blown away by all your ideas!

As Andrew and Seth have already noted, Operation Firefox launched last month with a call for people to submit their plans to publicly display a Firefox Fathead sticker in the most interesting and eye-catching possible (legal) fashion.

We knew the success of this program would depend on whether or not people would rise to the challenge of coming up with great ideas and so far things are looking good: the initial phase of the contest ended last Friday, and we received a grand total of 3200 submissions. Very cool!

From a creative perspective, our goal was to create a website that would fire up people’s imaginations and inspire them to participate. This was a particularly fun project to brainstorm about, as we kicked around inspirational ideas ranging from James Bond to the A-Team. For the design, we turned to our friends at Nobox, and they made the astute call that site should resemble the secret hideout of an underground resistance movement rather than the slick style of a 007 HQ…hence the basement shadows and hand-sketched mission plans. It was also very important that every last bit of site text support this concept, so we worked with Elise Allen, who managed to incorporate influences from Fight Club to Flash Mobs into her copy.

The finalists have until December 3rd to execute their plans, and the winners will be announced shortly afterwards. All 50 Fatheads have been shipped to the finalists, so keep an eye out for giant Firefox logos popping up in strange locations over the next few weeks!