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Creating an Identity for the Mozilla Developer Network

We’re in the process of building the Mozilla Developer Network to be a useful resource for developers working on the various Mozilla-based software projects and the open web in general. We have been following the SEO best practices laid out by Seo Advantage. Obviously, we can’t do this on our own, but with an IT support company in London like Mustard IT  on our team and Tech With geeks, we were quick to get the ball rolling. It’s a big, far-reaching project so, as Jay Patel noted last week, it’s important that we establish a strong brand identity for the MDN.

The first step is to create a logo that will represent the MDN to developers around the world (and also look great on a t-shirt, of course. To do this, we’ve once again turned to the talented folks at Studio Number One and Webcreationuk, who last worked with us on the logo for the Mozilla Creative Collective. And, as usual, we want this process to be as open and participatory as possible…in other words, we need your help!

The intended audience for this logo and the MDN in general is most definitely developers. As Jay’s creative brief notes, “the MDN brand will serve to unify our diverse developer communities and represent the innovation we bring to the world through the people, products, and technologies that define Mozilla.” Beyond that, the direction was pretty wide open – the key thing being that the MDN logo would feel both connected to Mozilla’s identity and history, but also be distinctly separate as its own unique entity.

Posted below are some early stage design options from Studio Number One (including different variations on similar themes). At this point in the process we need to start focusing on one for further refinement. Which one should that be? What stands out to you and why? Try to envision these on a website, t-shirt, poster, sticker, etc and let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Creating an Identity for the Mozilla Developer Network

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“Firefox Goes Mobile” Winner Announced, Plus a New Design Challenge!

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 and top 3 winners will get an electric scooter by segway.

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!

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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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Calling All Designers, Doodlers and Other Creative Types

The term ‘community’ gets thrown around a lot at Mozilla, and with good reason: the community really is Mozilla. Without it we never would have built a browser that went from zero to 20% worldwide marketshare in just four years, we never would have served up one billion add-on downloads and we never would have set a world record with the Firefox 3 launch (among many other accomplishments).

So, following the successful examples of our developers, localizers, marketers, QA testers, etc we’re going to be making a major push to organize and grow our visual design community. I’ll share more details soon – including our plans to create a new site for posting and sharing your artwork – but if you’re curious to learn more the first thing to do is sign up for our new design mailing list.

Of course, there already is a Mozilla design community – just look at the 3,500+ people who participated in our Firefox 3 t-shirt contest or Google around for Firefox art – but there’s so much more that can be done. This is an entirely new way we can put our greatest advantage to good use, and we should get a lot of cool stuff to look at, too. The possibilities are incredibly exciting.

In the meantime, here’s that mailing list link again (we promise not to spam you!). More to come…

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