intothefuzz

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog a little more frequently about what Tara, Laura and I (aka the creative dept) are doing at Mozilla (as well as other thoughts that cross my mind from time to time). 2010 is going to be a huge year, and we have some exciting things in the works that I’m looking forward to sharing soon.

I’m also in the middle of a slow-moving visual refresh of intothefuzz.com, so bear with me if things look a little weird over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the ongoing success of Firefox in 2009, and here’s to a great 2010!

*Crossposted from the Mozilla Blog*

The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective’s “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge are in, and I’m happy to announce that the winner is “Pocketfox”, by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Firefox, we’ll be using this image as an avatar on social networking sites, on mozilla.com, on t-shirts and more. It makes a great addition to our portfolio of Firefox imagery!

Yaroslaff, who is based in Krasnodar, Russia, cites as his design inspiration, “the Firefox itself, your approach to the web-site execution, and of course my wife who always brings up new ideas.” Be sure to check out his other Mozilla work as well as his general portfolio.

The four runners-up in the challenge were Mauro Henrique de Bulhões Fidelix’s “Hot Navigation”, Emmanuel John Y. Villar’s “One Mask One Family One World”, Joyce Schellekens’ “Firefox All Around the World” and Eric Yeoung’s “MobiFox”. Interestingly, these designers all hail from different countries (Brazil, the Philippines, the Netherlands and Indonesia), which speaks to the incredible diversity of our community. Many thanks to them, and to everyone else who participated, for sharing their time and talents with Mozilla.

We’ve also launched a new challenge at the Creative Collective: “Five Years of Firefox”. Help us celebrate Firefox’s 5th birthday by creating designs based on this milestone. The possibilities are practically endless, but should generally focus on recognizing what a great accomplishment this is for the Mozilla community and what it’s meant for the hundreds of millions of people who use Firefox. The winner will be featured on this blog, turned into desktop wallpaper and t-shirts, and more.

The submission period for “Five Years of Firefox” ends on December 9th, but don’t wait to get started. Visit the design challenge page for more details, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

OneWebDay is tomorrow, and the Mozilla Foundation has asked people to show their support with this clever poster campaign. There’s still time to get on board, so if you love the web (and I know you do), check out Mark Surman’s blog for some handy step-by-step instructions…then start snapping!

Kanye West is popping up all over the place these days. Most recently, he couldn’t resist putting in his two cents about Mozilla Service Week:

Mozilla Service Week is here! All week long (and beyond), members of the Mozilla community are putting their Internet skills to good use by helping people and organizations who need assistance with various online activities. More than 11,000 hours have been pledged so far, which is very cool.

Although my technical skills are hovering somewhere close to zero, I found an opportunity to help a organization called Hidden Villa. Hidden Villa is (and I’m quoting their site here) “a nonprofit educational organization that uses its organic farm, wilderness, and community to teach and provide opportunities to learn about the environment and social justice.”

They do some really cool stuff, but could use some help communicating it, so I’ll be doing some copywriting for them and advising them on how to present their web content. If you’re a designer and are interested in helping out, let me know and we can work on it together.

I’ll post a follow-up on my experience with Hidden Villa soon. In the meantime, there’s still time to help so visit the Mozilla Service week site to find out how you can get involved.

With the browser world now more competitive than ever, it’s essential that we tell the story of what Mozilla is and why Firefox matters as effectively as possible. There are a lot of ways to do this, of course, but it’s hard to find a better communications tool than good visual design…which is why I’m so excited about today’s beta launch of the Mozilla Creative Collective site.

The Creative Collective is the hub of our growing design community, and a place for people around the world to use their talents to help the Mozilla mission and make connections with their fellow artists. The site – which was designed by the talented folks at Airbag Industries (now part of Happy Cog) and built by our phenomenal WebDev team (including freelancers Ryan Snyder and Craig Cook) – has a variety of features to facilitate sharing, social networking and generally getting involved, with more stuff on the way. Definitely check it out – there are already some hidden gems in the gallery.

As Tara noted in the official announcement, Mozilla actually has a long history of open source design projects, but we’d never had much in the way of an organized community until now. I love the idea of expanding the scope of the overall Mozilla community to include visual designers, and can already think of so many ways they’ll be able to contribute (more on that later).

Like any community project, the key to the Creative Collective’s success will be getting people to participate. Here’s how you can help:
* Contribute a design that inspires people to take action for Mozilla Service Week as part of our first mini-challenge (details at the Mozilla Blog). We have t-shirts waiting for our favorites!
* Upload Firefox or Mozilla-themed artwork you’ve created in the past, or do something brand new and share it with the world.
* Even if you’re not a designer you can join the Creative Collective and get things going by following your favorite artists or “liking” designs you enjoy.
* Help us spread the word by telling your designy friends, tweeting, posting on Facebook, etc. Every design detail page includes a widget to make sharing via your social networking sites super easy.

Huge thanks goes out to the following people for everything they did to make the Mozilla Creative Collective launch possible: Tara Shahian, Jeff Zeller, Mike Morgan, Ryan Snyder, Craig Cook, Ryan Doherty, Greg Storey, Ethan Marcotte, Stephen Caver, Helenita Johnson, Stephanie Schonauer, Studio Number One, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, Raymond Etornam, Shyam Mani, Catherine Brady and Paul Kim.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that this is still a beta site, and we’re counting on the community to help set the agenda for what comes next and generally make it better. So, if you find any bugs or have ideas for features and functionality that you’d like to see, please let us know. See you on the Creative Collective!

Last Friday, Firefox surged past one billion total downloads, which is totally amazing and mind-blowing.

Another cool thing about the milestone is onebillionplusyou.com, which was organized by our summer marketing interns, Shannon Prior, William Reynolds, Irina Sandu and Jeff Zeller. In addition to the site itself, which nicely ties in the significance of one billion not just for Firefox but for the web as a whole, there are two subtle underlying messages I like:

1. We have awesome interns, no doubt about it.
2. Internships at Mozilla provide the opportunity to do interesting, high profile, meaningful work…not just low level stuff or running errands (and that applies across the company, not just in marketing).

(And none of this is meant to overlook the amazing work on this from WebDev, QA, IT and l10n, each of whom deserve their own post for their consistent excellence at pretty much everything.)

Like a lot of people at Mozilla, a big reason why I was drawn to this job was the opportunity to be part of an organization where the primary motivation was working towards a worthy cause rather than the financial bottom line. So, I’m particularly excited that we’re taking that commitment to doing good deeds to the next level with the recently announced Mozilla Service Week.

The concept is really simple: connecting people who know a thing or two about technology with people who could use their help. It could be anything from writing code for a non-profit that lacks that expertise to teaching senior citizens how to use the web…Mary, Jane, David and Mark have all given more thorough examples over on their sites.

On the design side of things, we had a good time figuring out how to translate the concept of the program into a visual theme. We were torn between doing something super-clean and functional, like a modern Web 2.0 site, and something more humanistic and cause-oriented, like a 1930’s WPA mural.

In the end, we decided to split the difference: we brought in our friends at The Royal Order and asked them “If the Internet had existed in the 1930s and a company like Vimeo had hired Diego Rivera to design their site, what would it have looked like?” (I always enjoy crazy hypotheticals.) Rather than running screaming in the other direction, they went to work and came up with the look shown below…I’m a big fan of how it turned out (especially the guy riding the biplane wing). We also brought in copywriter LaDonna Willems to explain everything in clear and engaging language.

Mozilla Service Week isn’t until September, but there’s lots you can do between now and then: you can already pledge your volunteer hours, or you can sign yourself or your organization up to be helped. Plus, be sure to start tagging related materials with “mozservice09″ on sites like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious to spread the word.

The Mozilla community has achieved some amazing things in the past, so I can’t wait to see what we can do this time. Should be good!

Chris Blizzard and the Mozilla evangelism team recently launched a site called hacks.mozilla.org, devoted to showing off a variety of Firefox 3.5 demos over the next 35 days. Although the demos are undoubtedly extremely cool, my personal favorite thing about the site is the throwback-style design by Mozilla Labs’ Sean Martell.

When we were planning this site, our goal was to update Shepard Fairey’s classic “hack” artwork in a way that retained the original charm while reducing the “happy worker” iconography that understandably rubbed people the wrong way (much like with our “Mozilla: 10 Years” piece from last year). I’m really happy with how it turned out (big thanks to Sean).

The most exciting thing for me about all this is the realization that, just as Mozilla has built up a rich history of software development over the past decade, we’re also establishing a very nice visual design tradition. It’s a great sign for where we are as an organization that we can both draw on ‘classic’ styles that hold a lot of instant meaning for people while also creating new favorites like the Firefox robot or the mozilla.com illustrations. It’s a good place to be, and bodes well for a lot more coolness coming in the future.

The Browser Wars are old news, and even the Browser T-Shirt War isn’t generating the headlines (ok, one blog post) that it once did. These days it’s all about the Hot Air Balloon Race.

Mozilla.com homepage, June 2008-present:

Microsoft’s Bing.com homepage, June 2009:

In the “quirky illustrated version” category, here’s one more for good measure.

(h/t: RWW)