Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

sgarrity writes "I've written some recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundation's project and product line. I argue that the Mozilla Project should adopt a simple, strong, consistent visual identity for the Mozilla products including consistent icons across applications that mesh with the host operating system. Read Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0 and let us know what you think."

Comments

Re:What people really want...

[cK-Gunslinger]

I have mixed feeling on this. While I like the idea of more and more people using Mozilla/Firebird, monoculture is rarely good.

If Mozilla advertises that they can 'block ads' easily and everyone downloads and uses it, then you will piss off a lot of advertising people. Advertising people have money. They will either come up with new (annoying) methods of delivering advertisments, or buy some legislation that makes blocking ads illegal. Look at Tivo. They can't really advertise '30-second skip ahead' as 'Automatic Commercial Skipping Feature.' I think Replay TV already lost that fight. So Tivo makes it an 'undocumented' feature that only a few 'elite' users know about. Same thing with 'hacked' region-free DVD players.

Sometimes, it's nice to be one of the 'elite' who knows about and uses superior technology that's still under the radar of mainstream.

Re:Why bother?

[geekoid]

"And, finally, it's called Opera, ..."
yeah, corporation all over are just looking to spend money on a browser when they can get one for free.

a great contribution

[danharan]

Reading through the comments, it seems a lot of people don't really see the value of good branding. They should look at some of Steven Gerrity's other work.

He's the creative director of Silver Orange, a company with a great track record for producing highly usable designs. They recently got noticed (again) for another outstanding intranet design, and their e-commerce sites perform very well - funny, sales actually increase when you make sure "normal users" can figure out how to buy.

Even if we programmers don't give a damn about visual identity, it's nice to see designers worrying about such things and wanting to contribute - especially when they have a track record of making things nicer so more people use them.

While I'm commenting, I'd also like to recommend people check out the silverorange labs, currently featuring some cool simple CSS tabs.

Now if only we could get more PR people to donate their time to Mozilla...