Navigation

Archive | PlanetMozilla

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

By on June 1, 2009 in Community, firefox, PlanetMozilla

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!

Back to the fuzz

Mozilla Creative Collective: Logo Complete!

By on March 27, 2009 in Community, Design, Mozilla, PlanetMozilla

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!

Back to the fuzz

Announcing the Mozilla Creative Collective

By on February 2, 2009 in Community, Creative Collective, Design, Mozilla, PlanetMozilla

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!

Back to the fuzz

Calling All Designers, Doodlers and Other Creative Types

By on December 17, 2008 in Community, Design, Mozilla, PlanetMozilla

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…

Back to the fuzz

Mozilla Goes Green

By on November 14, 2008 in Branding, Mozilla, PlanetMozilla

A bunch of Mozillians are up in San Francisco today as part of our involvement with the SF Green Festival. It’s certainly a new type of conference for us, but when you look at the core values of the various other affiliated organizations there are a lot of commonalities in terms of trying to affect change through community building and grassroots action.

We’re also using this as a platform to communicate our “100% organic software” concept, so from a design perspective this gave us a great opportunity to use one of my favorite elements from the Mozilla.com redesign: our little family of egg illustrations. They’re so bizarre and yet, so perfect.

We worked with designers Monique Johnson and Rhonda Spencer to create egg-based collateral that included a print ad for the festival guide (below), landing page, affiliate buttons (available for download) and more.

There will be Mozilla-related activity at the festival all weekend long, so if you’re in the area definitely stop by and check it out. Mary has a good overview of the details up at her blog.

Mozilla Goes Green

Back to the fuzz

Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes