Author Archive | John Slater

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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Firefox 3.5 Launch: Video Workshop

All month long the marketing team here at Mozilla has been hosting a series of workshops to get people mobilized for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 launch. Speaking of hosting, check this out.

And tomorrow, Alix Franquet and I will join the fun with a short presentation on how you can use videos to help spread the word.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ll be covering:
* How videos (especially community-created ones) help us spread Firefox
* The channels we use to share these videos
* Filming tips
* Technical tips
* Update on the My Firefox, My Words project
* Grand unveiling of a new community marketing campaign called “Fastest Firefox”. I think you’ll like this one.

The workshop is at Wednesday, May 20 at 9:00 am PDT/16:00 UTC. Here’s how to join us:
* Dial +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#.
* Or, you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#.
* If you’re outside the US, use Skype to call in with the toll-free number listed above.
* If you can’t join the call — but want to ask questions — you can join us in #marketing on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).
* You can also follow along (with sound and video) on the Air Mozilla marketing channel.

Don’t miss the action…hope to see you there!

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Mozilla Creative Collective: Logo Complete!

The Mozilla Creative Collective is a newish project designed to organize and grow our budding visual design community. When the site launches later this year it should be a pretty awesome place for designers to share their work, make new connections and help spread the word about Firefox, Thunderbird and the other Mozilla products.

Of course, any visual design community needs a cool logo, which is why we asked Studio Number One to help us out. And, any open visual design community needs to get people as involved as possible in processes like these, so I’ve been posting each round of the comps for everyone’s feedback.

After all that, we finally have the *official* Creative Collective logo (see below). I’m really happy with how it turned out…big thanks to Studio Number One for their work, of course, but we also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the dozens of people who offered their comments (both good and bad) along the way. This is a great example of what an open process can achieve…your input had a tremendous impact on the final look of the logo. Thank you!

So, what’s next for the Creative Collective?
* Main thing right now is to nail down the full scope and functionality of the site. We’re putting the final touches on the wireframes with Airbag right now, and Tara will be sharing some details soon on some of the features we’ll be including to make participating in the Creative Collective as fun as possible.
* After wireframes, we’ll move on to the design…will be interesting to see how the logo ends up influencing that.
* Then, Ryan Doherty and our amazing WebDev team will have to build the site…no small task, but they’re more than up to it.
* If you want to follow along (and contribute along the way), then sign up for our email list or follow us on Twitter. Otherwise, just get ready to flex those creative muscles!

Mozilla Creative Collective: Logo Complete!

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Announcing the Mozilla Creative Collective

As I’ve mentioned in the past, building up Mozilla’s visual design community is one of my (and Tara’s) top priorities for 2009. There are already designers out there doing good work, of course, but the larger scale possibilities are nearly limitless if we get more organized and continue to bring more people into the fold.

With that in mind, I’m excited to announce the Mozilla Creative Collective hosted on our brand new WordPress server.  The idea is to build on what we started with past projects like the Firefox 3 T-shirt Contest and the Community Store by creating an online hub where our community activity can take place.

In some ways this is inspired by the concept behind wartime propaganda posters (although I should be clear that this is neither war nor propaganda): using widely distributed and well-made art to convey a message. In this case, we want to make it possible for people to cover the web with art inspired by Firefox (and other Mozilla products). We also want to create an online social environment where designers and non-designers alike can connect and collaborate in a positive, communal atmosphere.

Right now we’re still in the planning stages and are dreaming big. One way we want to encourage participation is by building in functionality that allows for regular design challenges. For example, we might issue a challenge to create art that represents Firefox’s speed, with the ‘winner’ to be determined by the ratings provided by others in the community.

Another component would be a job board of sorts, where non-designers can request design work for their Mozilla projects. The idea is that a student in India who’s hosting a download party at his college’s computer lab could request a design for a promotional flyer and have it be created by someone in, say, Poland. Then, that design could be posted publicly and be reused by community members for their own campaigns.

You can read more details about our plan on its wiki page. It’s ambitious and will be a lot of work, but should be a fun process. We’ve enlisted Airbag Industries to help us design the site, and of course the amazing Mozilla Web Dev team has proven time and time again that they can build literally anything that we can dream up.

Lastly, if you like the sound of this and want to be more involved with the Mozilla visual design community, I highly recommend signing up for our mailing list. I’ll be blogging more about this project, of course, but the list is a good way to stay very up-to-date on all the latest happenings.

That’s it for now…more to come!

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