Mozilla Open Design

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Categories: General

Now for the fun part of Mozilla’s logo design.

583 responses

On our open logo design journey together, we’ve arrived at an inflection point. Today our effort—equal parts open crit, performance art piece, and sociology experiment—takes its logical next step, moving from words to visuals. A roomful of reviewers lean forward in their chairs, ready to weigh in on what we’ve done so far. Or so we hope.

We’re ready. The work with our agency partner, johnson banks, has great breadth and substantial depth for first-round concepts (possibly owing to our rocket-fast timeline). Our initial response to the work has, we hope, helped make it stronger and more nuanced. We’ve jumped off this cliff together, holding hands and bracing for the splash.

Each of the seven concepts we’re sharing today leads with and emphasizes a particular facet of the Mozilla story. From paying homage to our paleotechnic origins to rendering us as part of an ever-expanding digital ecosystem, from highlighting our global community ethos to giving us a lift from the quotidian elevator open button, the concepts express ideas about Mozilla in clever and unexpected ways.

There are no duds in the mix. The hard part will be deciding among them, and this is a good problem to have.

We have our opinions about these paths forward, our early favorites among the field. But for now we’re going to sit quietly and listen to what the voices from the concentric rings of our community—Mozillians, Mozilla fans, designers, technologists, and beyond—have to say in response about them.

Tag, you’re it.

Here’s what we’d like you to do, if you’re up for it. Have a look at the seven options and tell us what you think. To make comments about an individual direction and to see its full system, click on its image below.

Which of these initial visual expressions best captures what Mozilla means to you? Which will best help us tell our story to a youthful, values-driven audience? Which brings to life the Mozilla personality: Gutsy, Independent, Buoyant, For Good?

If you want to drill down a level, also consider which design idea:

  • Would resonate best around the world?
  • Has the potential to show off modern digital technology?
  • Is most scalable to a variety of Mozilla products, programs, and messages?
  • Would stand the test of time (well…let’s say 5-10 years)?
  • Would make people take notice and rethink Mozilla?

This is how we’ve been evaluating each concept internally over the past week or so. It’s the framework we’ll use as we share the work for qualitative and quantitative feedback from our key audiences.

How you deliver your feedback is up to you: writing comments on the blog, uploading a sketch or a mark-up, shooting a carpool karaoke video….bring it on. We’ll be taking feedback on this phase of work for roughly the next two weeks.

If you’re new to this blog, a few reminders about what we’re not doing. We are not crowdsourcing the final design, nor will there be voting. We are not asking designers to work on spec. We welcome all feedback but make no promise to act on it all (even if such a thing were possible).

From here, we’ll reduce these seven concepts to three, which we’ll refine further based partially on feedback from people like you, partially on what our design instincts tell us, and very much on what we need our brand identity to communicate to the world. These three concepts will go through a round of consumer testing and live critique in mid-September, and we’ll share the results here. We’re on track to have a final direction by the end of September.

We trust that openness will prevail over secrecy and that we’ll all learn something in the end. Thanks for tagging along.

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583 comments on “Now for the fun part of Mozilla’s logo design.”

  1. Carl wrote on

    I like The Eye, but it might be better with classic Mozilla red instead of yellow

  2. Niklas wrote on

    “For The Internet of People” is my favorite. A colorful theme represents the presumably more youthful and playful attitude of them as opposed to many big brands, and there are countless variations possible as indicated with Egypt and Brazil. However, the design has to be accompanied by a more readily readable name. The colors and forms of some other themes are completely over-the-top imo. I wonder how they ended up being among the last seven.

  3. Pierluigi PETRA wrote on

    I think that the logo may have less profound meanings but more visual impact. Mozilla remembers an animal, possibly prehistoric, but nice and good. For this reason I developed these two proposals.

    mozilla-6

  4. Farhan wrote on

    Helloo!!! How can I participate in this competition? Where I can Submit my logo concept?

    1. Tim Murray wrote on

      Hi Farhan,
      Thanks for your interest! This is an open critique, not a competition. We are welcoming feedback and ideas, so if you’d like to attach a sketch in your next comment, we’d be appreciate seeing it. Thanks ~

  5. Armin wrote on

    When we’ll have a winner?

    1. Tim Murray wrote on

      Hi Armin, we are currently on track to make a final design recommendation in October. Thanks for being a part of this creative review process.

  6. Lizbift wrote on

    This is a short comment and probably you didn’t see it, but I like to say that I really love your current logo, the little fox hugging the world it’s simply adorable. Just an opinion, I will be glad with the final choice as long as your services keep being so good.

    1. Tim Murray wrote on

      Thanks for letting us know how happy you are with Firefox, Lizbift. You’ll be pleased to learn that this Open Design initiative is for Mozilla, the nonprofit behind Firefox. By teaching people about the Internet around the world, advocating for equal access to the Internet, and developing core technologies that will help the Internet continue to grow, Mozilla is helping to keep the Internet a global public resource, accessible and equal to all. Firefox, the open-source Web browser you use, is one of the ways we demonstrate our values in the world. Thanks again for being a loyal Firefox user.

  7. Anna Kohler wrote on

    I usually don’t say anything if I don’t have anything nice to say, but these are all terrible. The only decent one is the Mozi://a one. I seriously can’t even imagine how you came up with these ideas, it seems like zero thought was put into them and you just started designing random logos without even caring what mozilla is or what it stands for.
    1. the eye – terrible idea, like everybody said.
    2. the connector – seriously? it looks like a bad Olympics logo, the horizontal version looks like a person swimming + it’s unintelligible
    3. open button – looks like a music app
    4. wireframe world – Paint 101, awkward layout and font, looks like it was made by my 5yo niece, even though the idea is not that bad, just horrendous execution
    5. the impossible M – again, it looks like a bad Paint job. The idea is not bad but absolutely terrible execution. I would be embarrassed to go to the smallest client with that, even if I was working for free
    6. flik flak – way too much going on

  8. Alexandre Soares da Silva wrote on

    “The Eye” is the best option! Strong and versatile!

  9. Joshua Bere wrote on

    “The Eye” has an interesting aspect about it. Would love to see applications

    Bere-Avator

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