Wanted: Your T-Shirt Photos

John Slater

Whether you’ve been around Mozilla for 10 years or 10 minutes, it’s a well-known fact that t-shirts are a big deal here. We all feel passionate about our gear, and every Mozillian has at least a few favorite shirts piled up in a drawer somewhere. (Side note: this is a good article about why t-shirts matter at tech companies.)

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with dozens of different t-shirt projects during my time at Mozilla, and for awhile was very diligently chronicling all the shirts I worked on as well as ones created before I came on board. However, over time other priorities got in the way and eventually I stopped my archiving entirely (the link earlier in this paragraph covers through the fall of 2008).

But, a recent conversation with Greg Jost and this blog post by Wil Clouser have convinced me it’s time to bring the t-shirt archive back. I need your help though.

So, let’s create a new archive of all the Mozilla shirts that are out there. Here’s what to do:

1. Visit the brand new Flickr pool and see if you have any Mozilla-related shirts not pictured.
2. If you do, take a picture of the shirt (can be of you wearing it or of just the shirt…as long as the design is clearly visible) and add it to the pool. If you remember any details about when/where/how you got it, please add those as well.
3. Share this post with your fellow Mozillians so we can get their shirts as well.

I’ll share updates as the pictures come in. Can’t wait to see what you have to share!

Localizing our brands

Matej Novak

10 responses

Lately we’ve been discussing how to handle localization of our brand names. There’s currently a note about it on the translation page of the style guide, but that will soon be updated to the following:

Our brand names do not get localized, translated or transcribed. Anything that’s a proper noun with a leading capital letter (Firefox, Marketplace, etc.) remains in the original English and is always spelled out in Roman characters. In some languages, depending on the grammatical case of the word, it may need to have a different ending or be otherwise rewritten to make sense. In these instances, please rewrite the sentence instead to keep the brand name unchanged. All other names (add-ons, themes, etc.) should be localized as usual.

We decided to add the clarification after a recent discussion about how to translate “State of Mozilla.” (The example that sparked it came from Polish, but I’ll use Czech since it’s similar.)

Because of the way Czech works, there’s no word for “of” that you can use in that phrase. Instead, a literal translation becomes “Stav Mozilly,” where the changed spelling denotes that it’s “of Mozilla.” If we were to write it as “Stav Mozilla,” however, to a Czech speaker that would be the equivalent of writing “State Mozilla” in English. It’s not only awkward, it’s also wrong.

We’d like to preserve the spelling of our brand names wherever possible, so in this case the solution we suggested was to rewrite the phrase to something like “Mozilla: Stav společnosti” or “Stav společnosti Mozilla,” which means “state of the company.” The meaning is preserved, as is the spelling.

Please let us know in the comments if this is something you’ve encountered when localizing. We’d love to get more examples and hear about other languages where this kind of thing happens.

The One Mozilla Style Guide Is Here!

John Slater


We recently launched a new tool that should make the lives of all Mozillians a little (or a lot) easier: the One Mozilla style guide.

What it means for the big picture:
The idea is to define what it means for a website, product, logo, promotion, etc to look & feel like Mozilla so we can make sure we’re presenting a consistent and unified message to users everywhere they encounter our work. As Mozilla continues to grow and evolve, that consistency is essential to telling our story effectively.

What it means for you:
Practically speaking, the style guide has all kinds of goodies to help you – logos, fonts, color palettes, code + other details on how to make Mozilla websites, and much more…it’s all there. It’s meant to be a handy reference, so please browse around and familiarize yourself with how to use it. And most importantly, if you’re working on a new user-facing Mozilla project, be sure you’re following these general parameters.

What’s coming next:
The guide is a work in progress, and we’ll be continuing to add more content in the coming months (especially a lot of info about product design in conjunction with the UX team). And, if you have questions or would like to share feedback of any sort don’t hesitate to post them in the comments section here.

Big thanks to Sean Martell and Matej Novak, who have driven much of the work on the guide so far, and to the further talents and contributions of Mike Alexis, Raymond Etornam, Ty Flanagan, Steven Garrity, Holly Habstritt, Michael Kelly, Celia Liang, Anthony Ricaud, Pete Scanlon, Tara Shahian and Lee Tom.

(cross-posted from intothefuzz)

Firefox OS Desktop Wallpaper Update

John Slater

Last month I asked the Mozilla community for help sourcing photography that we could use as default wallpaper in the first Firefox OS device. I expected that we’d get some good photos, but have to admit that I was blown away by the volume and quality of the submissions…in less than two weeks we received more than 2,500 photos, the large majority of which were truly fantastic images.

As you can imagine, selecting a mere handful of pictures from that batch was not easy, but the Firefox OS team here went through each one and, after a careful process, has narrowed it down to 17 finalists. We still need to whittle the group down a bit more, but I wanted to share a status report on where things currently stand.

To see the photos that made the initial cut just click on the image below. These picture aren’t guaranteed to make it into Firefox OS, but the team felt like they had the right mix of quality, brand attributes and product fit (remember, in the end these images won’t be viewed as you see them here…they’ll be cropped to fit a phone screen and will have app icons layered on top) to potentially be included.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to submit photos…even if yours didn’t make it, we’re tremendously grateful for your help and truly blown away by your talent. There are a *lot* of great photographers in the Mozilla community.

Greetings from Mozilla’s Creative Team!

John Slater

Welcome to the official blog of Mozilla’s creative team.

Our role is to communicate the Mozilla Firefox story through visual design and copywriting, which means we work on a really wide range of projects – websites, logos, advertising, marketing campaigns, t-shirts, posters, videos, etc…you name it. We also set the broader look & feel strategy for all these types of projects by creating and maintaining the Mozilla style guide.

As a quick background as to who we are, the current lineup of the team looks like this:
* Ty Flanagan, visual designer (twitter)
* Sean Martell, lead visual designer (blog/twitter)
* Matej Novak, copywriter (blog/twitter)
* Tara Shahian, creative manager (blog/twitter)
* John Slater, director of creative (blog/twitter)
* Lee Tom, visual designer

We’ll be using this site to share our work, talk about our creative process and discuss our brand strategy. We’d like this to be the hub of our interactions with the very awesome Mozilla community, so please post questions, comments, critiques or any other thoughts you might have about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It definitely should be a two-way conversation, in other words.

Stay tuned for much more coming soon, and thanks for reading!