Archive | June, 2009

Building a Mozilla Visual Design Community

The Mozilla community has achieved more incredible things than I can count, and includes experts dedicated to disciplines ranging from software development to customer support to marketing to QA and much more. But, one key area that’s traditionally lacked an organized community is visual design.

Art is such a powerful form of communication, and over the past 11 years we’ve built up such a large body of iconic Mozilla imagery, that building a true community around it seems like the next logical step. Helping make this a reality is one of my biggest goals for 2009, and between our efforts so far on the Mozilla Creative Collective and the cool stuff happening around Personas we’ve already made some great strides toward that goal (with much more to come!).

So, with all that in mind, I’m really excited about our new partnership with the folks at Infectious. As Jay Patel announced yesterday, we’ve teamed up with them and their own community of artists to create a series of pieces inspired by Firefox. To help celebrate the upcoming 3.5 release, this artwork is available in a variety of formats, including iPhone skins, laptop stickers, car decals and more at the Infectious site, plus t-shirts and personas. Definitely check it out.

At the start of this project we gave the artists a series of classic Mozilla & Firefox values – community, innovation, idealism, open source and performance – and asked them to interpret them in their own styles. It was really fun to watch these talented artists use these basic themes in such different ways to produce such diverse results.

And, we’re just getting started. Next month we’ll team up with Infectious again to launch an open design initiative based around the same concepts and ideals listed above. It’ll also coincide with the beta launch of the Creative Collective site, which will be another huge step forward for our growing community (much more info on that coming soon).

Lastly, big thanks to the five artists – ZeptonnDavid LanhamEtsu MeusyReuben Rude and Paulo Arraiano – who contributed their talents to this project. Really inspiring stuff.

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World’s Fastest Clapper, Meet World’s Fastest Firefox

Note: I just announced the launch of our Fastest Firefox community marketing project over at the Mozilla Blog. Here’s a crossposted and slightly expanded version:

Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and it’s shaping up to be by far the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2.

That’s a fact worth celebrating, and to spread the word we’ve reached out to some of our fellow Guinness World Record holders, each of whom knows a few things about speed. Our first record holder is Kent “Toast” French, whose ability to clap his hands 721 times in a minute (averaging 12x/second!) officially earns him the title of the world’s fastest clapper. Along with his son Joshua, Kent put on a truly astounding display of in honor of Firefox 3.5:

We know that Kent isn’t the only person in the global Mozilla community with a talent for speed, so if you want to help tell the world about Firefox 3.5 here’s what to do:

1. Make a short (30 seconds, max) video of you doing your speediest skill. It doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire or mowing your lawn…it just has to be fast.

2. Visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the easy instructions on how to upload your video to us.

3. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a compilation video that really shows off what our community is capable of, so check back about a week after the 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt plus, of course, worldwide fame and the satisfaction of helping the open web.

In addition to Kent and the other record holders (more on them soon), this project came together because of the effort and talents of the very worthy people listed below. Big thanks to:

Elise Allen
* Catherine Brady
* Alex Buchanan
Fran Capo
Pascal Chevrel and our truly amazing team of localizers
Delicious Design League and The Royal Order
Stephen Donner
* Alix Franquet
* Steven Garrity
* Mike Gauthier
* Paul Kim
Nicole Loux
Nobox
* Jeremy Orem
* Krupa Raj
Tara Shahian
Melissa Shapiro

Can’t wait to see your speedy videos!

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