High fashion comes to Mountain View: David, JT and Seth do their best Blue Steel poses and show off some potential new caps that we’re considering adding to the Mozilla Store. Which one do you like best? (the caps, not the models)

A candid photo of Internet superstar Asa Dotzler eating chips, drinking coffee and spinning tall tales on the couch in my/David’s office.

I’m not really so into the idea of posting pictures of myself in this blog, but the t-shirt shipment came addressed to me and I was the first person to wear one, so…

Anyway, here’s the latest Mozilla shirt, this time for Rock Your Firefox. I really like the way it turned out. Lee Tom did a great job putting a new twist on his original Rock Your Firefox art…I’ll definitely be wearing this one a lot.

Update 9/18/07: Added a new photo featuring me and Paul. We didn’t plan this, I promise.

Like the old commercial says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. With that in mind, David Rolnitzky and I have been working to improve the Firefox first run page with the aim of increasing the post-download user retention rate.

The previous version of the page was light on concrete ‘getting started’ information, so in the new page (which went live a few days ago) we wanted to provide a few quick tips on how to use some popular Firefox features. Our assumption was that if we can educate people on these features early on in their Firefox experience, they’ll be more likely to come back next time.

The big challenge was to provide this info in an easily scannable and non-invasive way so as not to delay people from actually using their new browser. To do this, we’re exposing just one tip at a time - the rest are discoverable through a series of pretty nifty DHTML transitions. We also focused on only four very easily understandable features and tried to keep the copy as short as possible.

This is obviously a crucial page in the Firefox new user experience, so we’re considering this the first in a series of tests. Right now it’s only available in the en-US version, but once we have a better idea of what works we’ll begin the process of localizing it for Firefox users around the world.

A screenshot of one of the panels is below, but I highly recommend viewing the actual live version of the page to get the full effect.

Thanks to Paul Kim, Mike Beltzner, Chris Beard and Jay Patel for their feedback and advice on this page. Big thanks to Alicia Patterson for her design work and Steven Garrity for his DHTML wizardry.

Doug Turner is cooking up some really cool high-tech stuff with Project Joey, so it was fun to take his concept and turn it into a real website.

The basic idea is that you can use Firefox to mark your favorite content from around the web (text, pictures, etc) and have it all aggregated on your cell phone and personalized web page. Even better, you just have to mark it once and it will automatically update on your phone and web page as the content changes (you could select the top headlines on CNN, for example).

We started with just a blank page, so it was all a little abstract, but our designer, Henry Brown, did a really nice job of turning Doug’s thoughts into something concrete. The idea was for the site to be very clean and simple, but with a slightly futuristic touch.

Joey is still a work in progress, but the screenshot below shows where it’s going. If you’re feeling cutting edge and curious definitely visit the live Joey site (using Firefox), download the extension and play around with it.

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.

Greetings, and welcome to Into the Fuzz!

First, a bit about myself. I’m the Creative Director at Mozilla, which basically means that I’m the least technically skilled person in the entire company. I joined Mozilla in March to help guide the evolution of the brand and work on a wide variety of design-type projects. Stay tuned for plenty of details on those…

Among other things, I’d like this blog to be an ongoing dialogue with you guys out in the community about what Mozilla is (in an abstract sense). I’ll also be posting a lot of examples of creative works-in-progress and inviting your comments. My goal is to make this blog a fun & easy read with lots of interesting stuff to look at.

On a personal note, I live in Oakland with my wife, two-year old son and two cats. Prior to Mozilla, I worked for many years at Ofoto, starting as the copywriter and then managing the creative department there. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas but have lived in the Bay Area since 1996. When not doing Mozilla stuff, I mainly like to hang out with my family, but also find time to play bass guitar and work on my ping pong game.

So, that’s it for now…stay tuned for lots more, and thanks for reading!