21 ms·

Mozilla launches new brand identity

292 points by dao- 10y ago

K0nserv 10y ago
This looks very similar to the new curl logo[0]. I guess that must be intentional as Curl and Mozilla are fairly closely tied. Daniel the lead developer of Curl works at Mozilla. In any case I like it 0: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/
- gcp 10y ago
  The :// is in fact identical, which is actually a bit weird.
  - tspiteri 10y ago
    They both use the symbols, but the design is not identical. The curl colon is high off the baseline, while the Mozilla colon is not.
- tspiteri 10y ago
  That's bound to happen when a logo is based on something so core to the context.
- pixelmonkey 10y ago
  The logo makes a whole lot of sense for curl, especially given curl's target market. The Mozilla logo is problematic, IMO, because of its target market (the entire Internet userbase) and the fact that the "://" is being used as a kind of l33t-speak for the letters of the brand name. Such an odd decision.
threatofrain 10y ago
I never thought Mozilla's logo was a problem, but now I think moz://a is kind of cryptic and non-inviting.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  I never thought Mozilla required a new brand identity, there wasn't anything wrong with the old one. As others said, Mozilla has been doing projects that seemed a bit off, like the phone OS. Honestly they just need to focus on Firefox, Thunderbird, MDN, lobbying for a free Internet and help design open standards. Mozilla has a great, trustworthy image, their management just needs to focus on the things Mozilla does well.
- Ygg2 10y ago
  To rephrase a game reviewer, it seems there is a stupid epidemic in Mozilla. I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot like rebranding Yahoo.
  - dao- 10y ago
    I don't see how this compares to Yahoo, as Mozilla hasn't been a very strong brand to start with (as opposed to Firefox). I think the idea is to try to better establish it as a geeky brand next to the more consumer-oriented Firefox. Also, in case you're referring to the Yahoo -> Altaba rebrand rather than a former Yahoo logo change: Mozilla is keeping its name. This is just about the logo.
    - Ygg2 10y ago
      I meant the logo change of Yahoo.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    People who decide the company direction often do so based on their own past achievements. So if you hire too many PR guys eventually someone will try to rebrand your corporate identity.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      These days it seems that big name FOSS projects are overrun with "social"...
nishs 10y ago
Will there be noticeable visual changes to Firefox as a result of the rebranding?
- dao- 10y ago
  AFAIK this isn't going to affect the Firefox brand nor the Firefox UI. Coincidentally however there is a visual refresh planned for Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171
SFJulie 10y ago
The same way a university is what a faculty becomes when it loses interest in its student, a brand is what an open source project becomes when it loses interests in its community.
- wtbob 10y ago
  That right there is genius! I'm adding it to my .sig file.
wodenokoto 10y ago
There has been a very long and public design process involved in this [1]. Some of the final contenders were not what I would have expected to see even considered [2]. I think it is good that Mozilla stuck to a geeky expression. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Very glad they skipped the Sauron-eye. Not sure how that even got as far along as it did. This kind of seems like the best of a bunch of mediocre concepts. Instead of having a design agency do the logos and then selecting from them, it would have been interesting to take designs from the community - surely some more interesting designs would have been proposed.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  It's OK to say "These all suck" rather than choosing the least crappy option. I've been using Firefox since it's inception and the Communicator Suite before that. To me this just screams out as a plea for attention to the younger generations. This is like some weird episode of Saved By The Bell where Mr Belding puts on jeans and a ball cap to try and fit in with Zach and Slater.
- pluma 10y ago
  Okay, looking at the second link, I'm glad they went with the least horrible one out of the bunch, but the better decision still would have been not to use any of them. The "eye" looks like either the Eye of Sauron (i.e. evil) or a stylized vagina (i.e. inappropriate). The "connector" is cute but useless for branding because it becomes excessively generic. The "open" looks like someone mixed a console icon with an insurance company's logo. The "wireframe" is bland with weak typography. The "impossible M" is appropriate for a conference but not a company. It also just doesn't work at smaller scales or with other colors. The "flik flak" is not even a logo. These aren't good designs for their purpose. The "moz://a" logo isn't good but it's vastly more appropriate than the rest of them.
- 10y ago
aembleton 10y ago
Mozilla is feeling very corporate these days. Can you remember the time when we all chipped in so that they could get a full page advert for Firefox in the New York Times? I think it would help if they had less money, so that they would focus more on their core product - a web browser.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I think Rust is the second best thing to come out of Mozilla and seemingly pretty far from what could be considered a core product (at least at conception time)
  - aembleton 10y ago
    Good point. Rust is a good product and wouldn't have happened without them trying different things.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- divanvisagie 10y ago
  > I think it would help if they had less money You have to be joking right? So as soon as an open community becomes well funded you hate on it. Seems like you are more interested in rooting for the underdog than actually succeeding with open source ideals.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    Having too much money can drive you away from your core focus and lead you to waste time. Not saying that's what's happening at Mozilla, but the OP isn't completely wrong in that criticism.
- gcp 10y ago
  Can you remember the time when we all chipped in...I think it would help if they had less money Mind = Blown. Taking money for advertising and branding is OK if it's yours? I can get behind that, hahaha!
edblarney 10y ago
It's easy to be critical, but from a branding, identity and especially aesthetic perspective, this is not very good. That said, it doesn't matter very much - if the product is robust with good APIs + they are making the other strategic decisions they need to given their small market share, they will do ok. That said, an exceptional consumer focused branding initiative could actually help them quite a lot.
- gcp 10y ago
  I assume you're being downvoted because you said "it's easy to be critical" and then didn't go on to explain why you thought it wasn't good.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    It's actually terrible. The logo itself isn't so bad, but the rest of it is borderline disaster. The spot lacks originality, consistency, the creative quality is quite low. I respect the notion of trying to mix images and forms that are obviously inconsistent with each other - but that's a hard/risky thing to do and they didn't pull it off. My god they have windows 'webdings' with arbitrary shapes, odd colour effects, smiley faces. The icons are inconsistent with each other. The sequence from the 13 second mark to the 19 second mark is up there with the worst bits of 'professional' marketing collateral I've ever seen in any domain. Even the music ... it sounds like the first thing a kid put together the first time he tried to make a rhythm sequence on garage band. Here is a very similar sounding track (the fun/jungly rhythm line), well produced, which has a modern, fresh feel and would fit the narrative of whatever they were trying to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg That track without the vocals would have been a good choice. All of that before we get into the branding issues, and how consistently or poignantly it promotes Mozillas actual identity - there is absolutely nothing in that spot that directs you to what Mozilla is, or is trying to be. Ask yourself: after you watched that, did you get any idea at all of what they were trying to say? Even from a creative perspective? It's gibberish. Even the copy: "The internet it's at the heart of what we do" "One idea link what we do" "Mozilla Festival/Fest" "Mozilla maker party" "Mozilla all hands" "Mozilla emerging technologies" "And spans the world" "It works both big and small and welcomes everyone" "For people over profit" "Champions for a healthy internet" "Love the internet" WTF? It's almost random copy. Here's what would have worked better: Just the logo (which is decent). A single tag line, like: "For the people" - which hints at the idea of open/non-profit and 'empowerment' without having intellectualize it, and modestly differentiates them from the 'other' browser brands. A modern audio track, done by producers who know how to create a fresh sound, followed zooms and cuts of actual good apps in a mozilla browser. Now wouldn't be particularly great, but it would be simple, clean, and at least not confusing. That said it could have been saved with higher quality creative work. Ironically, the site where they actually run down their branding effort, is itself, a pretty good branding exercise unto it's own: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ So that is 'being critical'. I don't like to be so negative, but this spot shouldn't have made it out.
k_lander 10y ago
hehe. clever.
kome 10y ago
:/
- sgift 10y ago
  Using a variation of a well known smiley for "skeptical / meh" as your new logo ... interesting choice.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    That's impossible to unsee now. Thanks... ://
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gcp 10y ago
    The "skeptical" angle fits the organization (and some part of its users) well, IMHO.
  - pluma 10y ago
    The funny thing is that it's not even a stretch. "://" can easily be read as an emphasised version of ":/" because repetition was (is?) sometimes used for strong emphasis in traditional emotes (e.g. :))), :(((, >>:( etc). So "://" is basically "extremely meh".
- stymaar 10y ago
  http://** http://** has been here a really long time without no-one complaining about it containing a «disappointed face» …
nkkollaw 10y ago
I absolutely love it. 100 times better than the old one. Before clicking I thought it would suck, like many other rebranding efforts I've seen semi-recently (see Yahoo!), but this looks really cool. :// stands for internet/web, but it's also generic enough to work in other situations IMO. Good job.
- hetfeld 10y ago
  Seriously? ://
  - nkkollaw 10y ago
    Well,.their logo isn't ://, it's Moz://a. I don't see a face, there.
- nilved 10y ago
  moz://a looks cool. The :// sad-uninterested-disappointed face already has its own connotations.
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  Well, that or they've italicised the ill in their name for emphasis...
dijit 10y ago
It doesn't speak to me. The peppy music and over the top statements don't jive either, I consider mozilla to be a geek brand and everything in the video is feel-good overly generic stuff reminiscent of a poor startup intro video. Then again, I'm not sure I'd do better. But I'm just saying.. doesn't speak to me about anything.
- niftich 10y ago
  I happen to disagree with you despite perceiving the video itself much the same. I don't consider myself to be someone to whom peppy tribal drumbeat, bright neon colors, and fairly generic messages alluding to multiculturality and betterment of humankind appeal, but I can sympathize with their ambition of being known and perceived as an organization that champions causes with broader implications than just technical details. The :// is a nice nod to nerddom and a tribute to its origins, but the rest of it tries to punch it out of its box of 'we write code and set standards and stuff' that increasingly hasn't been the whole story. They need something that appeals to a broad, diverse group of people who may be tech-savvy but not have a background in tech, and whose lifestyles and futures are at stake in the power struggle for the open web. I think this is a rather good effort that works and is notably much, much better than any of the other options that were under consideration in their open process.
yAnonymous 10y ago
I like it, but all the rebranding doesn't matter until I see improvements in Firefox.
amelius 10y ago
At first sight, the :// symbol made me think it was an alternate form of the :( emoticon.
kirb 10y ago
The favicon is almost identical to MSDN’s. https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico Which, now that I think of it, has an identical name to MDN anyway. Oh well.
keehun 10y ago
Am I missing something? They're not using it as the main icon in the header of their main website and rather only as a little one in their footer.[0] Is this not meant to be a big change from the status quo (which I thought was just fine and not stagnant)? [0]: https://www.mozilla.org/ https://www.mozilla.org/
- callahad 10y ago
  The video leaked ahead of the formal announcement (which is coming in the next hour or so).
digi_owl 10y ago
meh...
captainmuon 10y ago
I'm a bit disappointed. Mozilla makes a couple of great things (Firefox, Rust, MDN, ...). But in contrast to their products, I have a quite bad impression of their Foundation and/or Corporation. I don't know if it is warranted or not, but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions they get from Google for setting them as default search engine. Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff. Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and impressions are important. This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this. What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was invented. Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.
- niftich 10y ago
  I think that a fair amount of people share your views. Some time ago I articulated [1] that I find that Mozilla has to appeal to three very different groups of people, and its efforts to appeal to one are met with disdain from the others. To quote a portion of my post, these audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness: [a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten online [b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google [c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161
  - dao- 10y ago
    It's interesting that you mention this here, as it seems to me that the Firefox and Mozilla brands do in fact try to appeal to different groups of people. I believe the Firefox brand caters for [a] while the Mozilla brand seems like a better fit for [c]. [b] seems to be somewhere in the middle...?
kenrick95 10y ago
Is this public yet? I see that the video is still unlisted.
- louhike 10y ago
  You can go to Mozilla website as it is used now on it.
timdeneau 10y ago
The original is objectively better. There’s a lesson in here somewhere on why you shouldn’t make design decisions a public matter.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Why is a graphic of a dinosaur objectively better?
  - gcp 10y ago
    Because they went extinct, duh! Wait a minute...
  - ufo 10y ago
    I starter living the dinosaur a bit more when I learned about its history https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
    - jwilk 10y ago
      Pro-tip: don't click on this link. Instead, copy the URL and paste it into location bar.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Honestly, @dang, can we enforce that all links to jwz go through archive.org? Then everyone could see the content, jwz wouldn’t get the unwanted traffic, and people wouldn’t have to deal with "why did you just have a NSFW image open at work"
        narag 10y ago
        Would anybody mind to share the background story on this?
    - timdeneau 10y ago
accountface 10y ago
It's not very good. Very generic, too developer-centric. They had some interesting (mostly bad) options in their exploration and they ended up with something mediocre. I actually thought some of the best designs were cut the earliest in the process (which is typical for design by committee). They'd almost be better served going with one of the worse options because at least it would have a bit more personality. Open-source is great for a lot of things, but it's incredibly rare to find good design in open-source spaces. This doesn't change that.
brianbreslin 10y ago
this :// reminds me of :-/ or the shrug emoji. not really the happy face they are aiming for. OR did I misinterpret it?
drivingmenuts 10y ago
I don't like it - it reminds me of bloomberg.com. OTOH, I've stopped using Firefox, so, really no voice in the matter anymore. Best of luck to them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pinoyyid 10y ago
I'm neutral on the rebrand, but imho a rebrand needs to be accompanied by a restructure/refocus/resomething. Otherwise it's a pointless marketing exercise. The heyday of Mozilla was when it was the sole champion of a vendor neutral internet, competing with IE. That battle has long since been decided (spoiler alert: Chrome wins), but Mozilla is still fighting it, this time with Chrome as the enemy. It really needs to go find a new battle to fight. Persona is a great example of the kind of stuff that Mozilla should be focussed on - vendor neutral enablers of identity, payment, security, etc etc. Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? If we're going back in time, please bring back the original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:Mozilla_boxing.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:M...
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? Mozilla is a platinum-level sponsor of Let's Encrypt. https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/
- callahad 10y ago
  > Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? ...because it already was? The whole thing started as a collaboration between Mozilla and the EFF. Its success allowed Josh to spin it out into an independent organization, and focus on it full-time. There are many other fronts that Mozilla is fighting on, just less visibly: WebAssembly, Rust, Daala/AOMedia, WebVR, etc. Having lived through the first browser wars, I can think of few things more important for the safety and health of the Internet than a vibrant, competitive browser market. And with the progress being made on Servo and Quantum, I suspect conceding to Chrome would be premature.
- lxt 10y ago
  Let's Encrypt was founded by a group including Mozilla, EFF, and the University of Michigan. Mozilla is also a platinum sponsor. So yes, it is a Mozilla project. Source: I am a Mozilla employee and a board member of ISRG (which operates Let's Encrypt).
- ensignavenger 10y ago
callahad 10y ago
The formal announcement is now live at https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
hackuser 10y ago
This blog post seems like a much better link to use: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
SunboX 10y ago
_ _ _ / // / _ __ ___ ___ ___(_) / // /_ _ | '_ ` _ \ / _ \_ / / // / _` | | | | | | | (_) / / _/ // / (_| | |_| |_| |_|\___/___(_)//_/ \__,_|
- graphememes 10y ago
  When it looks like this, it isn't complete shit
- jest3r1 10y ago
  moz://a.nfo
akjainaj 10y ago
I'm really appalled about how the foundation keeps burning money on frivolous stuff like this or Firefox OS* or Persona and on the other hand they killed Thunderbird and they have been unable to release a sandboxed Firefox or a fast Gecko. * I consider Firefox OS to be a frivolous waste of money because Gecko is barely bearable on a mid-range desktop computer, how did they even think of putting it in a low-end ARM CPU? I understand guys here don't like negativity like the one in this comment, but Mozilla being a company that asks for donations, I feel like I can complain about what they do with them.
- kbrosnan 10y ago
  Your donations were not used by Mozilla to develop Firefox OS or otherwise fund it. Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation which solely focuses on education and advocacy for an open internet. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/ Firefox OS development is not an active project. This has been the case for right around a year.
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    I see. There's a clear shortage of engineers in Mozilla projects. Why isn't the money from donations used for that instead of political stuff? If the guys over at Mozilla don't want to use the money for engineering purposes, I think they should stop asking for donations and tell people to donate to entirely political projects such as the EFF instead. The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is.
    - dblohm7 10y ago
      > The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvements-in-firefox-for-desktop-and-android/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvemen... https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-next-for-multi-process-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-nex... https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a3b7174b3c12#.qgj0m0liz https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a...
madenine 10y ago
Confusing, especially with "Moz" being one of the bigger players in the SEO space. Google "moz://a", you're going to get mostly stuff about Moz. Good luck dethroning an industry leader in SEO at... SEO.
- fnord123 10y ago
  My first reaction was to enter moz://a as a uri in Firefox but it didn't work. booo!
  - Navarr 10y ago
    I can't stop seeing it as a URI. Why "a"? They should've just had URI fun and rebranded as moz:// (pronounced "mahz") moz://firefox moz://thunderbird the list goes on! I guess you could have moz://a/firefox but why A? A disk drive?
    - chejazi 10y ago
      As a Chrome user I saw it and imagined it as moz://a[ll_settings] similar to chrome://settings/ It would've been cool if something actually lived there.
    - CM30 10y ago
      I think they'd end up in a fight with the SEO/marketing company if they just went with moz://. I mean, moz://a is confusing enough as it is.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
AaronMT 10y ago
Try explaining the now largely irrelevant portion of '://' URL syntax to someone unfamiliar. It's a struggle.
- dao- 10y ago
  Considering that :// is not a protocol, how did you try to explain this? :>
- awj 10y ago
  Were you successful in explaining to him what a Google is?
mxuribe 10y ago
Anyone know where I can grab/download the font? What can I say, I do like the font...and, yes, I'm one of those people who love courier and georgia-type fonts, hence my appreciation for this one. Anyway, if anyone knows where i can grab the font files, please reply. Thanks!
- chuckharmston 10y ago
  It should be available in the next month as they finish off the brand guide. The partner type foundry is also expanding to include Cyrillic and Indic character sets.
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    Great, thanks!
- kem 10y ago
  The font is great. This is a situation where I think if they had just focused on a new font, the right font, it would have been perfect. Instead, they pushed it too far in my opinion, with the overly clever glyph replacement. This seems like the sort of thing that will be enshrined in epic design mistakes to me. Great font, should stop there, tries to embellish too much, goes overboard into confusing users.
hubert123 10y ago
This could just as well be a poster for some communist dorm room or antifa meetup: http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG I saw the others designs that they had, they were all even worse than this. Somebody made a mistake by not firing that design firm and hiring somebody else.
lurker69 10y ago
No reference to the fox? http://www.gagbar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f128f61c1ef0cc0df74bdd56.jpg http://www.gagbar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f12...
mattl 10y ago
"Selected to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding, Zilla has a journalistic feel reinforcing our commitment to participate in conversations about key issues of Internet health." When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Quite a long time before Windows got other monospace fonts.
- josteink 10y ago
  > When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor? Oh boy, do we have a youngster here. Back in the days. Before true type (freely scalable) fonts. When Windows was based on DOS. Even the default console font in MS DOS was courier-like. It's not a far fetched claim. It definitely shows long roots. Also: Show source in Firefox uses (used?) Courier iirc.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattl 10y ago
    * The default console font in MS-DOS wasn't Courier like. It comes from the video hardware. * Here's a screenshot of Windows 1.0 showing the various fonts it ships with, you'll note the Terminal font is different from Courier. https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558 https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558 and in another video here https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154 https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154 -- you can see Windows 1.0 Notepad using non-Courier font. * Here's Notepad for Windows 3.1 -- https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613 https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613 Perhaps you'll take a break from ageism and provide some better examples? FWIW, I'm about 2 years younger than you.
sotojuan 10y ago
Is there a reason they put old, dumb memes in some of their imagery? http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_2017_logo_with_imagery.jpg http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_...
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  They seem to be going the "internet hipster mememaster" route.
- rudolf0 10y ago
  I winced.
tbirrell 10y ago
moz://a is interesting imagery as a protocol. But I still don't understand how this is any different for them. I just see a new site.
- pcunite 10y ago
  Makes me think of an automobile manufacture saying, "We've switched all the gas and brake pedals with each other. You're gonna love it!"
makecheck 10y ago
This is an example of something that is neat on the surface but completely blows up in practice, after even a few moments of consideration. First, what do you ask for in a query? Will some web sites choose to say “mozilla” and others “moz://a”, thereby splitting search traffic between the references? Just typing something like “moz://a” (even in a comment post such as this) might cause some sites or scrub-analyzers to assume that the text represents a valid URL of type "moz" and try to make it clickable and resolve to that URL type. Bonus points for the first malware to figure out how to hijack the "moz" URL type. What is their web site? Not "moz://a" but "https://www.mozilla.org" https://www.mozilla.org". Can anyone even type "moz://a" or "https://moz://a" https://moz://a"? Can’t wait for this to cause problems.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
  I'm one of the people that are confused and tried moz://a in chrome and firefox.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I feel like this should have been an easter-egg before they went live.
    - cpeterso 10y ago
      Easter egg coming soon, maybe? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=moz%3A%2F%2Fa https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=moz%3A%2F%2Fa
      - toyg 10y ago
        easter egg that won't work in any other browser, hence making it harder for people to find mozilla and switch. I just can't even
  - Esau 10y ago
    When it saw it, I thought that perhaps they should change the configuration url from "about:" to "moz:". Also, the new logo reminded me of Curl.
lallysingh 10y ago
And this identity is Wired from the late 1990s. Not far off: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/ from: http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-biopeep/skaggs-stopbiopeep-wired-5-98-700-2/ http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-biopeep/skaggs-stopbiop...
- 128keaton 10y ago
  It looks..interesting. WIRED got it right, though. I feel as if grandpa Mozilla got on iFunny and found some memes.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    Yeah. The more I looked back at those old images, the more I realized how measured their use of unusual design was for solid effect.
    - 128keaton 10y ago
      it WAS cool not because it was, but because it wasn't, if that make sense
jwarzech 10y ago
Wow - this is actually sort of cringey. Reminds me a lot of what aol tried to do several years ago; manufactured coolness. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_generation_next.php http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_gene...
- PerryCox 10y ago
  Yep, plus the announcement makes it slightly harder to download Firefox. That seems like a bad idea to me.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Is anyone going to www.mozilla.org to download Firefox?
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      From time to time yes.
    - heimatau 10y ago
      I thought I was supposed download from http://moz://a http://moz://a . I couldn't download anything. /s(aracasm)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andrei_says_ 10y ago
I tried typing www.moz:lla.org in the browser but it didn't work. What am I doing wrong? (I know what I'm doing wrong but not everyone would. Typing a brand's name in the browser in the hopes to get to their website is not illogical.)
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  You mistook the slashes ('/') for l's, try typing: www.moz://a.org
  - Nizoss 10y ago
    Does this work only in Firefox? What does it show?
    - panglott 10y ago
      The top DuckDuckGo result was the Museum of Modern Art (moma.org).
  - lima 10y ago
    It's not a valid URL so it goes to the Google search? :-)
  - excalibur 10y ago
    "a.org" is apparently owned by "AutismAwareness.com", which is poor planning on Mozilla's part. I wish to know more about this "moz" protocol.
  - andrei_says_ 10y ago
    You're right! Wait, this didn't work even more. (It's a great day for moz.com, the first result in my region) Humor aside, what a disaster. I love Mozilla so much, so a failure in any of its branding aspects is painful for me. I'm wondering, is this caused by "smart people's blindness" -- the inability to see the world through the eyes of less educated individuals? In this case, presuming that * everyone knows how urls work and the role of slashes and semicolon * everyone knows it's "mozilla" despite substituting letters for punctuation But Mozilla is a large organization... how did they do a full rebranding without focus groups or at least showing it to a varied types of people. Lastly, where's my dinosaur?
marcosdumay 10y ago
Oh, visual identity. I was expecting some project similar to Persona.
- shmerl 10y ago
  That was my first thought too...
mc42 10y ago
Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the best of their options. [0] I wish them the best of luck with their rebrand and hope they realize that they don't need to sink their limited funding into a redesign, but rather into making their main product( or products if you include Rust / Servo / pdf.js / Thunderbird) functional and efficient. Making a product that offers something that others don't attracts the gravitas of power users that they're seemingly attempting to cater to with Dev Tools and Firefox Developer Edition. I digress, best of luck to the Foundation! [0] - https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > the new logo was by far the best of their options The old logo was the least of their problems.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. There was nothing really recognizable about the dinosaur, nothing which people would connect to Mozilla, if they didn't already know the dinosaur anyways.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      I believe he's referring to the old "mozilla" logotype logo.
    - slrz 10y ago
      Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. Good. Then drop the marketing and start doing something useful.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  That was the link I was looking for. I agree, it was the best out of that selection. I agree with the others on here, the dinosaur was the best.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
exolymph 10y ago
This smacks of design for its own sake.
jdhendrickson 10y ago
Never has it been more apparent that strong leadership is lacking at the Mozilla foundation. This looks like some interns at an ad agency got the chance to take the lead.
- johansch 10y ago
  At least they are well-paid (by Yahoo (sigh)) and an army of well-meaning but out of touch contributors.
- unethical_ban 10y ago
  One side project occurred that you think is unnecessary. So that means there is no leadership? Is the person who designed this also setting technical direction or approving new software?
  - dpark 10y ago
    Corporate rebranding is a side project now?
sehr 10y ago
Think it looks decent, boringish logo offset by a nice little color scheme. Won't be winning any awards, but eh
dang 10y ago
We changed the url from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw, since HN generally prefers text to video.
mei0Iesh 10y ago
Not that my opinion matters, but just to document it: I at first thought this was a new project, something having to do with identity. I clicked, and saw some messy images like someone was playing in GIMP. I looked at the logo, and it wasn't a word, but it also made no technical sense. I tried to parse it, but it doesn't parse. This caused me to feel discord. Then I looked at the whole thing again, and said out loud, "What the fuck is that?" Whatever it is, I don't like it. I didn't know Mozilla had an identity problem. I see at the top, the title, in all lower case is, "internet for people, not pr..." Hovering the title I see it's "not profit". I'm sorry but that makes your identity worse to me. I remember the dinosaur looking head with "mozilla" wasn't particularly professional, but it didn't seem to matter. It was fine. This new one hurts my brain. The slogan sounds like something from a teenager trying to rebel. I don't even know what it means. Internet for people? That's what the internet is, for people. That tells me nothing about Mozilla, except that they don't want profit. Which makes it sound like they're going to fail, because that's not even a good attitude to have. You profit if you're producing value and sharing it with people in a fair way that people love. This new identity seems to me like a grumpy uncool guy who is pissed he's uncool so decided his New Year's resolution was to change that. This is his makeover. His attempt to dress himself up and finally win the cool friends. But that tells me I wasn't enough as a friend. I've used Firefox forever. I never hated Mozilla, except I thought it was unfair when that CEO was forced to resign over his personal beliefs. I thought that was none of my business and nothing to do with the software. But I don't like words I c@n/t read. Micro$oft at least looks like a letter, please don't use s/ashes and co:ons in a w:0(o)r//d. But whatever. Soon I'll go back to not caring like the dinosaur. I'll recognize it from the pattern and not try to read it. Nothing much will change. You are who you are, and a wardrobe and new attitude won't make you popular. But good luck.
kukx 10y ago
I'm curious - why the new identity was needed? And what benefits can it bring? Currently I lean towards the opinion that it's just a mismanagement (especially looking at the final effect). I hope it's not true, because we really need a healthy, independent and privacy concious organization that provides a trustworthy browser.
- callahad 10y ago
  We're trying to bring Mozilla itself out from behind the shadow of Firefox, almost the inverse of when RIM renamed themselves Blackberry.
agumonkey 10y ago
The article makes me cringe hard. Browsing the page feels a tad better. I don't associate Mozilla with anthropoligical notions of web. To me they ship open products that incarnates the values, not brand and aesthetics. All in all I think it's 99% unnecessary and deviates attention from beautiful things like rust, mdn.
russellbeattie 10y ago
Heh... The irony of using Tim Berners-Lee's biggest regret - the :// - as the main logo element is quite amusing. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-...
newscracker 10y ago
I like the new Mozilla logo! I realized it's a logo and didn't type it as a URL to see if anything would happen. But I'm not sure if people who're not familiar with Mozilla (compared to the larger number of people familiar with the Firefox name) would be able to read the logo and get which company it belongs to. That's the brand marketing part, and needs to be done strongly. For all its faults, shortcomings and failures in certain experiments, I still love Mozilla and what it stands for!
- Vinnl 10y ago
  They've tested it with "regular" people that fall into their target audience, so it probably works well enough for that. https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/
mjolk 10y ago
With a side order of trying to cash-in/virtue-signal on "inclusion" (watch the carousel and read the tone of their landing page copy) as per recent blog posts and projects[1]. Mozilla's technology and their niche place in the internet ecosystem put them in the "hacker", in the traditional sense of the word, realm in (at least) my mind, where ideas matter and not identity politics -- this rebrand sells they idea that they're more focused on marketing and image than progress. Good luck folks, but you can keep your politics; my default is now suspicion of your content. 1) https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ (the text, source materials are a nightmare)
- tobr 10y ago
  What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean? I see it thrown around all the time. It's such a vague and weird way to criticize something, but it seems to represent something that make a lot of people very upset. I looked at the carousel images at mozilla.org and skimmed the article about anonymity to try to decipher what you mean, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Could you be more specific – what is the "virtue signal", and why is it so problematic?
  - mark_edward 10y ago
    Virtue signaling is term that had some scientific use but is mostly used online by people who don't like your morals, values, etc. Accuse you of doing if you display them at all in a public place. It's meant to be used to shut down anything but the most bland and status quo morality, by turning the simple act of showing any values at all into something nefarious instead something almost universal Someone says they want to hire more women, accuse of virtue signaling, rinse repeat. The thing is it works for literally any normative content.
    - tobr 10y ago
      Thanks. This makes me even more curious what were the values represented by the photos in the carousel, prompting mjolk to call them out as virtue signalling.
jlgaddis 10y ago
Wow. Just... wow. I think it's time to remove the Mozilla Foundation from the list of organizations I donate to. Apparently they've got enough money already, if blowing all these resources on this project is any indication. I remember when they announced their "short list" of "concepts" several months ago and thinking then how terrible they were. This reeks of "design by committee" more than anything I've seen in recent times.
- callahad 10y ago
  I believe this project was funded by the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), which is a separate, wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (MoFo). You can read more about MoFo at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/ Your donations go directly to, and stay within, the Foundation.
Animats 10y ago
They really needed to lose the dinosaur, but this isn't an improvement.
- arbitrage 10y ago
  The dinosaur was recognizable and unique, with a long history associated with the company. Why did it need to change?
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton of money.
    - toyg 10y ago
      License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean, whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.
pcunite 10y ago
We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet. I want to be known for not being snarky on the Internet. This is accomplished by doing, not announcing. An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and innovate without barriers or limitations. Warning: anyone who says it like this is probably going to do the exact opposite. What they mean is: anyone who does not disagree with us, is free to explore, discover, create, and innovate. The rest will be silenced as disruptive and harmful. Also commas are nice.
Groxx 10y ago
Not flashy, just text. Thank God. This might age well, and it's as trivial as it gets to create a branded-button / link.
trhway 10y ago
when your product starts to significantly fall behind and/or decline in usability, performance and quality - rebrand. "Creative strategizing" and "concepting" - telltales sign of the environment there.
pdog 10y ago
Isn't there already an internet company called moz? This just looks like moz followed by symbol swearing (#?*!). https://moz.com/ https://moz.com/
EastSmith 10y ago
I think that Mozilla should just fork Chrome, fix the privacy for everyone and go home.
- 5ilv3r 10y ago
  mozilla is just as bad as chrome now. Checkout all the call home URLs in about:config some time. There are dozens of features that are on by default calling home all the time. I tried to sanitize my phone once to save bandwidth, but ended up giving up and installing gnu icecat.
Andrew_Ssss 10y ago
The problem is one of literalness. Most designers (and many laypeople) will look at colon-forward-slash-forward-slash and easily see "ill," while many people who still type in URLs and use colons and forward slashes outside of sentences and they see those literal characters. It wouldn't be a problem if so many of Mozilla's target users didn't fall into that second group. This is a visual identity solution that is clever at first glance, and which seems especially clever to non-technologists, but shouldn't have made it all the way to market. There's a series of gates similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that a visual design should progress. One of the first three gates, even for a logotype, should be usability. It seems like the new Mozilla logo fails the usability test for enough core users to be a problem. It's cool to see designers take chances. You live and learn. I, personally, don't think their old identity was the thing holding them back, but new CMOs/CDOs love a visual rebranding. Nothing says this is now MY house more than a fresh coat of paint!
belvoran 10y ago
Well, people will just write Mozilla... because that's what they know, and a standard human doesn't want to learn. That's why they usually use FF for Firefox, although it's one word, and the official abbreviation is Fx. Promoting this change will cost millions. I hope this is not the same case, but when I was working on lots of places, and there was a manager who didn't have any results, he usually proposed things like this one. Useless, not needed, confusing clients, and extremely expensive. Then the upper management, who usually was not very technical, and couldn't understand our changelogs, was very happy with this change. Maybe because this was the only thing they could fully understand. This kind of change usually was something like: changing the name of the main product, the name of the company, or changing the official colors (which included a new logo, new website, lots of new printed materials). Did I say that this manager was promoted?
TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
I think this is what pisses me off when I see these big redesigns from companies. I am a front-end web developer who never wanted to be a front-end web developer. I wanted to be a designer (UX specifically). In order to get a job as a designer, you need a portfolio, preferably with shipped products. So I then create said portfolio to show of my designs (which I also developed because designs are nothing if they aren't implemented). However, with my fancy new portfolio (and still to this day), I can't seem to find me a design job, but I sure can find myself a front-end web position. I definitely would be happier in life if I was a designer. So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job?
- devopsproject 10y ago
  > So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job? Because it faster and cheaper to pay one person to do both the design and the work to make it a reality. There is also a supply and demand issue. Too many designers, not enough front-end devs (which is why you can easily find jobs as an employee) if you want to be a designer only, I would suggest striking out on your own and hiring out for the work you dislike.
  - TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
    I have been working on a plan to make this happen. Soon hopefully! :)
    - devopsproject 10y ago
      good luck!
etjossem 10y ago
From a recent Bugzilla entry: "REALLY ought to register 'moz' with IANA as well. Otherwise it might pop up as a 'real' protocol declaration in the future and we might have a conflict. We can just reserve the prefix so that it's not available for general use." I hope they do this soon.
- Wyverald 10y ago
  Alternatively, when a protocol "moz://" does pop up, they can just register the domain 'a'.
synicalx 10y ago
So when you search for 'moz://a' you wind up hearing all about moz.com.... Old mate Randy is probably pretty stoked about this.
TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
Is the logo gone? It wasn't gone a couple of hours ago
zatkin 10y ago
They did a pretty terrible job of getting the logo dispersed across their entire website. Just visiting the About page will lead you back to the old header: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/
pmontra 10y ago
Firefox Android, typed moz://a in the search bar, tap to search. Blank page, nothing happens. Congratulations for the new brand. Much fashion, very SEO.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mtanski 10y ago
design happened
shmerl 10y ago
I liked this identity quite a bit: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html
NamTaf 10y ago
Good lord it's atrocious. Either I see the :/ face or I consciously feel my brain strain to parse it in full because decades of web experience have taught me to ignore the left side of the :// unless I'm specifically interested in the security of the connection to the endpoint. Using non-alphabetic characters in a logo requires a pretty careful execution. An old ISP here used to be Optus@Home. I could parse that fine because it was fairly balanced, relatively minimal and reads smoothly (say it out loud and it is perfectly pronouncable, so reading it in your head is similarly effortless). In contrast, moz://a both looks weird (the / stand far higher than the alphabetic characters in most fonts, there's 3 letters on one side and 1 on the other), it's mentally taxing (how do I pronounce ://? oh wait, that's right, I need to parse it as 'ill' when reading it in my mind's voice. I also need to remember when focusing on it in isolation not to parse it as a smiley like decades of internet usage has conditioned me to. This is the same effect as when you see <3 in some maths/code and parse it as 'heart' rather than 'less than three') and it doesn't smoothly parse as a standalone thing like @ does as 'at'. I really don't like it.
debt 10y ago
i dig the rebrand. it's oddly timeless.
reallymozilla 10y ago
Wait, what was wrong with their old branding? The new typeface is fine, but that :// is cringe-worthy. Kewl, mozilla, very kewl.
mcbits 10y ago
This design looks really old-school and amateurish, like it should be a blinking marquee on Mozilla's first Geocities page. I personally like old-school techie nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that this sort of branding will backfire (assuming branding has any effect at all) for an organization that pushes "progress" in many ways.

292 points by dao- 10y ago

This looks very similar to the new curl logo[0]. I guess that must be intentional as Curl and Mozilla are fairly closely tied. Daniel the lead developer of Curl works at Mozilla. In any case I like it 0: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/

gcp 10y ago
The :// is in fact identical, which is actually a bit weird.
- tspiteri 10y ago
  They both use the symbols, but the design is not identical. The curl colon is high off the baseline, while the Mozilla colon is not.
tspiteri 10y ago
That's bound to happen when a logo is based on something so core to the context.
pixelmonkey 10y ago
The logo makes a whole lot of sense for curl, especially given curl's target market. The Mozilla logo is problematic, IMO, because of its target market (the entire Internet userbase) and the fact that the "://" is being used as a kind of l33t-speak for the letters of the brand name. Such an odd decision.

threatofrain 10y ago

I never thought Mozilla's logo was a problem, but now I think moz://a is kind of cryptic and non-inviting.

mrweasel 10y ago
I never thought Mozilla required a new brand identity, there wasn't anything wrong with the old one. As others said, Mozilla has been doing projects that seemed a bit off, like the phone OS. Honestly they just need to focus on Firefox, Thunderbird, MDN, lobbying for a free Internet and help design open standards. Mozilla has a great, trustworthy image, their management just needs to focus on the things Mozilla does well.
Ygg2 10y ago
To rephrase a game reviewer, it seems there is a stupid epidemic in Mozilla. I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot like rebranding Yahoo.
- dao- 10y ago
  I don't see how this compares to Yahoo, as Mozilla hasn't been a very strong brand to start with (as opposed to Firefox). I think the idea is to try to better establish it as a geeky brand next to the more consumer-oriented Firefox. Also, in case you're referring to the Yahoo -> Altaba rebrand rather than a former Yahoo logo change: Mozilla is keeping its name. This is just about the logo.
  - Ygg2 10y ago
    I meant the logo change of Yahoo.
- pawadu 10y ago
  People who decide the company direction often do so based on their own past achievements. So if you hire too many PR guys eventually someone will try to rebrand your corporate identity.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    These days it seems that big name FOSS projects are overrun with "social"...

nishs 10y ago

Will there be noticeable visual changes to Firefox as a result of the rebranding?

dao- 10y ago
AFAIK this isn't going to affect the Firefox brand nor the Firefox UI. Coincidentally however there is a visual refresh planned for Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171

SFJulie 10y ago

The same way a university is what a faculty becomes when it loses interest in its student, a brand is what an open source project becomes when it loses interests in its community.

wtbob 10y ago
That right there is genius! I'm adding it to my .sig file.

wodenokoto 10y ago

There has been a very long and public design process involved in this [1]. Some of the final contenders were not what I would have expected to see even considered [2]. I think it is good that Mozilla stuck to a geeky expression. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/

aaron-lebo 10y ago
Very glad they skipped the Sauron-eye. Not sure how that even got as far along as it did. This kind of seems like the best of a bunch of mediocre concepts. Instead of having a design agency do the logos and then selecting from them, it would have been interesting to take designs from the community - surely some more interesting designs would have been proposed.
cptskippy 10y ago
It's OK to say "These all suck" rather than choosing the least crappy option. I've been using Firefox since it's inception and the Communicator Suite before that. To me this just screams out as a plea for attention to the younger generations. This is like some weird episode of Saved By The Bell where Mr Belding puts on jeans and a ball cap to try and fit in with Zach and Slater.
pluma 10y ago
Okay, looking at the second link, I'm glad they went with the least horrible one out of the bunch, but the better decision still would have been not to use any of them. The "eye" looks like either the Eye of Sauron (i.e. evil) or a stylized vagina (i.e. inappropriate). The "connector" is cute but useless for branding because it becomes excessively generic. The "open" looks like someone mixed a console icon with an insurance company's logo. The "wireframe" is bland with weak typography. The "impossible M" is appropriate for a conference but not a company. It also just doesn't work at smaller scales or with other colors. The "flik flak" is not even a logo. These aren't good designs for their purpose. The "moz://a" logo isn't good but it's vastly more appropriate than the rest of them.
10y ago

aembleton 10y ago

Mozilla is feeling very corporate these days. Can you remember the time when we all chipped in so that they could get a full page advert for Firefox in the New York Times? I think it would help if they had less money, so that they would focus more on their core product - a web browser.

wodenokoto 10y ago
I think Rust is the second best thing to come out of Mozilla and seemingly pretty far from what could be considered a core product (at least at conception time)
- aembleton 10y ago
  Good point. Rust is a good product and wouldn't have happened without them trying different things.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
divanvisagie 10y ago
> I think it would help if they had less money You have to be joking right? So as soon as an open community becomes well funded you hate on it. Seems like you are more interested in rooting for the underdog than actually succeeding with open source ideals.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Having too much money can drive you away from your core focus and lead you to waste time. Not saying that's what's happening at Mozilla, but the OP isn't completely wrong in that criticism.
gcp 10y ago
Can you remember the time when we all chipped in...I think it would help if they had less money Mind = Blown. Taking money for advertising and branding is OK if it's yours? I can get behind that, hahaha!

edblarney 10y ago

It's easy to be critical, but from a branding, identity and especially aesthetic perspective, this is not very good. That said, it doesn't matter very much - if the product is robust with good APIs + they are making the other strategic decisions they need to given their small market share, they will do ok. That said, an exceptional consumer focused branding initiative could actually help them quite a lot.

gcp 10y ago
I assume you're being downvoted because you said "it's easy to be critical" and then didn't go on to explain why you thought it wasn't good.
- edblarney 10y ago
  It's actually terrible. The logo itself isn't so bad, but the rest of it is borderline disaster. The spot lacks originality, consistency, the creative quality is quite low. I respect the notion of trying to mix images and forms that are obviously inconsistent with each other - but that's a hard/risky thing to do and they didn't pull it off. My god they have windows 'webdings' with arbitrary shapes, odd colour effects, smiley faces. The icons are inconsistent with each other. The sequence from the 13 second mark to the 19 second mark is up there with the worst bits of 'professional' marketing collateral I've ever seen in any domain. Even the music ... it sounds like the first thing a kid put together the first time he tried to make a rhythm sequence on garage band. Here is a very similar sounding track (the fun/jungly rhythm line), well produced, which has a modern, fresh feel and would fit the narrative of whatever they were trying to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg That track without the vocals would have been a good choice. All of that before we get into the branding issues, and how consistently or poignantly it promotes Mozillas actual identity - there is absolutely nothing in that spot that directs you to what Mozilla is, or is trying to be. Ask yourself: after you watched that, did you get any idea at all of what they were trying to say? Even from a creative perspective? It's gibberish. Even the copy: "The internet it's at the heart of what we do" "One idea link what we do" "Mozilla Festival/Fest" "Mozilla maker party" "Mozilla all hands" "Mozilla emerging technologies" "And spans the world" "It works both big and small and welcomes everyone" "For people over profit" "Champions for a healthy internet" "Love the internet" WTF? It's almost random copy. Here's what would have worked better: Just the logo (which is decent). A single tag line, like: "For the people" - which hints at the idea of open/non-profit and 'empowerment' without having intellectualize it, and modestly differentiates them from the 'other' browser brands. A modern audio track, done by producers who know how to create a fresh sound, followed zooms and cuts of actual good apps in a mozilla browser. Now wouldn't be particularly great, but it would be simple, clean, and at least not confusing. That said it could have been saved with higher quality creative work. Ironically, the site where they actually run down their branding effort, is itself, a pretty good branding exercise unto it's own: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ So that is 'being critical'. I don't like to be so negative, but this spot shouldn't have made it out.

k_lander 10y ago

hehe. clever.

kome 10y ago

sgift 10y ago
Using a variation of a well known smiley for "skeptical / meh" as your new logo ... interesting choice.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  That's impossible to unsee now. Thanks... ://
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gcp 10y ago
  The "skeptical" angle fits the organization (and some part of its users) well, IMHO.
- pluma 10y ago
  The funny thing is that it's not even a stretch. "://" can easily be read as an emphasised version of ":/" because repetition was (is?) sometimes used for strong emphasis in traditional emotes (e.g. :))), :(((, >>:( etc). So "://" is basically "extremely meh".
stymaar 10y ago
http://** http://** has been here a really long time without no-one complaining about it containing a «disappointed face» …

nkkollaw 10y ago

I absolutely love it. 100 times better than the old one. Before clicking I thought it would suck, like many other rebranding efforts I've seen semi-recently (see Yahoo!), but this looks really cool. :// stands for internet/web, but it's also generic enough to work in other situations IMO. Good job.

hetfeld 10y ago
Seriously? ://
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  Well,.their logo isn't ://, it's Moz://a. I don't see a face, there.
nilved 10y ago
moz://a looks cool. The :// sad-uninterested-disappointed face already has its own connotations.
wbillingsley 10y ago
Well, that or they've italicised the ill in their name for emphasis...

dijit 10y ago

It doesn't speak to me. The peppy music and over the top statements don't jive either, I consider mozilla to be a geek brand and everything in the video is feel-good overly generic stuff reminiscent of a poor startup intro video. Then again, I'm not sure I'd do better. But I'm just saying.. doesn't speak to me about anything.

niftich 10y ago
I happen to disagree with you despite perceiving the video itself much the same. I don't consider myself to be someone to whom peppy tribal drumbeat, bright neon colors, and fairly generic messages alluding to multiculturality and betterment of humankind appeal, but I can sympathize with their ambition of being known and perceived as an organization that champions causes with broader implications than just technical details. The :// is a nice nod to nerddom and a tribute to its origins, but the rest of it tries to punch it out of its box of 'we write code and set standards and stuff' that increasingly hasn't been the whole story. They need something that appeals to a broad, diverse group of people who may be tech-savvy but not have a background in tech, and whose lifestyles and futures are at stake in the power struggle for the open web. I think this is a rather good effort that works and is notably much, much better than any of the other options that were under consideration in their open process.

yAnonymous 10y ago

I like it, but all the rebranding doesn't matter until I see improvements in Firefox.

amelius 10y ago

At first sight, the :// symbol made me think it was an alternate form of the :( emoticon.

kirb 10y ago

The favicon is almost identical to MSDN’s. https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico Which, now that I think of it, has an identical name to MDN anyway. Oh well.

keehun 10y ago

Am I missing something? They're not using it as the main icon in the header of their main website and rather only as a little one in their footer.[0] Is this not meant to be a big change from the status quo (which I thought was just fine and not stagnant)? [0]: https://www.mozilla.org/ https://www.mozilla.org/

callahad 10y ago
The video leaked ahead of the formal announcement (which is coming in the next hour or so).

digi_owl 10y ago

meh...

captainmuon 10y ago

I'm a bit disappointed. Mozilla makes a couple of great things (Firefox, Rust, MDN, ...). But in contrast to their products, I have a quite bad impression of their Foundation and/or Corporation. I don't know if it is warranted or not, but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions they get from Google for setting them as default search engine. Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff. Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and impressions are important. This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this. What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was invented. Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.

niftich 10y ago
I think that a fair amount of people share your views. Some time ago I articulated [1] that I find that Mozilla has to appeal to three very different groups of people, and its efforts to appeal to one are met with disdain from the others. To quote a portion of my post, these audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness: [a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten online [b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google [c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161
- dao- 10y ago
  It's interesting that you mention this here, as it seems to me that the Firefox and Mozilla brands do in fact try to appeal to different groups of people. I believe the Firefox brand caters for [a] while the Mozilla brand seems like a better fit for [c]. [b] seems to be somewhere in the middle...?

kenrick95 10y ago

Is this public yet? I see that the video is still unlisted.

louhike 10y ago
You can go to Mozilla website as it is used now on it.

timdeneau 10y ago

The original is objectively better. There’s a lesson in here somewhere on why you shouldn’t make design decisions a public matter.

MichaelGG 10y ago
Why is a graphic of a dinosaur objectively better?
- gcp 10y ago
  Because they went extinct, duh! Wait a minute...
- ufo 10y ago
  I starter living the dinosaur a bit more when I learned about its history https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
  - jwilk 10y ago
    Pro-tip: don't click on this link. Instead, copy the URL and paste it into location bar.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Honestly, @dang, can we enforce that all links to jwz go through archive.org? Then everyone could see the content, jwz wouldn’t get the unwanted traffic, and people wouldn’t have to deal with "why did you just have a NSFW image open at work"
      - narag 10y ago
        Would anybody mind to share the background story on this?
  - timdeneau 10y ago

accountface 10y ago

It's not very good. Very generic, too developer-centric. They had some interesting (mostly bad) options in their exploration and they ended up with something mediocre. I actually thought some of the best designs were cut the earliest in the process (which is typical for design by committee). They'd almost be better served going with one of the worse options because at least it would have a bit more personality. Open-source is great for a lot of things, but it's incredibly rare to find good design in open-source spaces. This doesn't change that.

brianbreslin 10y ago

this :// reminds me of :-/ or the shrug emoji. not really the happy face they are aiming for. OR did I misinterpret it?

drivingmenuts 10y ago

I don't like it - it reminds me of bloomberg.com. OTOH, I've stopped using Firefox, so, really no voice in the matter anymore. Best of luck to them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pinoyyid 10y ago

I'm neutral on the rebrand, but imho a rebrand needs to be accompanied by a restructure/refocus/resomething. Otherwise it's a pointless marketing exercise. The heyday of Mozilla was when it was the sole champion of a vendor neutral internet, competing with IE. That battle has long since been decided (spoiler alert: Chrome wins), but Mozilla is still fighting it, this time with Chrome as the enemy. It really needs to go find a new battle to fight. Persona is a great example of the kind of stuff that Mozilla should be focussed on - vendor neutral enablers of identity, payment, security, etc etc. Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? If we're going back in time, please bring back the original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:Mozilla_boxing.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:M...

Ajedi32 10y ago
> Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? Mozilla is a platinum-level sponsor of Let's Encrypt. https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/
callahad 10y ago
> Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project? ...because it already was? The whole thing started as a collaboration between Mozilla and the EFF. Its success allowed Josh to spin it out into an independent organization, and focus on it full-time. There are many other fronts that Mozilla is fighting on, just less visibly: WebAssembly, Rust, Daala/AOMedia, WebVR, etc. Having lived through the first browser wars, I can think of few things more important for the safety and health of the Internet than a vibrant, competitive browser market. And with the progress being made on Servo and Quantum, I suspect conceding to Chrome would be premature.
lxt 10y ago
Let's Encrypt was founded by a group including Mozilla, EFF, and the University of Michigan. Mozilla is also a platinum sponsor. So yes, it is a Mozilla project. Source: I am a Mozilla employee and a board member of ISRG (which operates Let's Encrypt).
ensignavenger 10y ago

callahad 10y ago

The formal announcement is now live at https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/

hackuser 10y ago

This blog post seems like a much better link to use: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

SunboX 10y ago

_ _ _ / // / _ __ ___ ___ ___(_) / // /_ _ | '_ ` _ \ / _ \_ / / // / _` | | | | | | | (_) / / _/ // / (_| | |_| |_| |_|\___/___(_)//_/ \__,_|

graphememes 10y ago
When it looks like this, it isn't complete shit
jest3r1 10y ago
moz://a.nfo

akjainaj 10y ago

I'm really appalled about how the foundation keeps burning money on frivolous stuff like this or Firefox OS* or Persona and on the other hand they killed Thunderbird and they have been unable to release a sandboxed Firefox or a fast Gecko. * I consider Firefox OS to be a frivolous waste of money because Gecko is barely bearable on a mid-range desktop computer, how did they even think of putting it in a low-end ARM CPU? I understand guys here don't like negativity like the one in this comment, but Mozilla being a company that asks for donations, I feel like I can complain about what they do with them.

kbrosnan 10y ago
Your donations were not used by Mozilla to develop Firefox OS or otherwise fund it. Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation which solely focuses on education and advocacy for an open internet. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/ Firefox OS development is not an active project. This has been the case for right around a year.
- akjainaj 10y ago
  I see. There's a clear shortage of engineers in Mozilla projects. Why isn't the money from donations used for that instead of political stuff? If the guys over at Mozilla don't want to use the money for engineering purposes, I think they should stop asking for donations and tell people to donate to entirely political projects such as the EFF instead. The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is.
  - dblohm7 10y ago
    > The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvements-in-firefox-for-desktop-and-android/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvemen... https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-next-for-multi-process-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-nex... https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a3b7174b3c12#.qgj0m0liz https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a...

madenine 10y ago

Confusing, especially with "Moz" being one of the bigger players in the SEO space. Google "moz://a", you're going to get mostly stuff about Moz. Good luck dethroning an industry leader in SEO at... SEO.

fnord123 10y ago
My first reaction was to enter moz://a as a uri in Firefox but it didn't work. booo!
- Navarr 10y ago
  I can't stop seeing it as a URI. Why "a"? They should've just had URI fun and rebranded as moz:// (pronounced "mahz") moz://firefox moz://thunderbird the list goes on! I guess you could have moz://a/firefox but why A? A disk drive?
  - chejazi 10y ago
    As a Chrome user I saw it and imagined it as moz://a[ll_settings] similar to chrome://settings/ It would've been cool if something actually lived there.
  - CM30 10y ago
    I think they'd end up in a fight with the SEO/marketing company if they just went with moz://. I mean, moz://a is confusing enough as it is.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

AaronMT 10y ago

Try explaining the now largely irrelevant portion of '://' URL syntax to someone unfamiliar. It's a struggle.

dao- 10y ago
Considering that :// is not a protocol, how did you try to explain this? :>
awj 10y ago
Were you successful in explaining to him what a Google is?

mxuribe 10y ago

Anyone know where I can grab/download the font? What can I say, I do like the font...and, yes, I'm one of those people who love courier and georgia-type fonts, hence my appreciation for this one. Anyway, if anyone knows where i can grab the font files, please reply. Thanks!

chuckharmston 10y ago
It should be available in the next month as they finish off the brand guide. The partner type foundry is also expanding to include Cyrillic and Indic character sets.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  Great, thanks!
kem 10y ago
The font is great. This is a situation where I think if they had just focused on a new font, the right font, it would have been perfect. Instead, they pushed it too far in my opinion, with the overly clever glyph replacement. This seems like the sort of thing that will be enshrined in epic design mistakes to me. Great font, should stop there, tries to embellish too much, goes overboard into confusing users.

hubert123 10y ago

This could just as well be a poster for some communist dorm room or antifa meetup: http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG I saw the others designs that they had, they were all even worse than this. Somebody made a mistake by not firing that design firm and hiring somebody else.

lurker69 10y ago

No reference to the fox? http://www.gagbar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f128f61c1ef0cc0df74bdd56.jpg http://www.gagbar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f12...

mattl 10y ago

"Selected to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding, Zilla has a journalistic feel reinforcing our commitment to participate in conversations about key issues of Internet health." When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?

lallysingh 10y ago
Quite a long time before Windows got other monospace fonts.
josteink 10y ago
> When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor? Oh boy, do we have a youngster here. Back in the days. Before true type (freely scalable) fonts. When Windows was based on DOS. Even the default console font in MS DOS was courier-like. It's not a far fetched claim. It definitely shows long roots. Also: Show source in Firefox uses (used?) Courier iirc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mattl 10y ago
  * The default console font in MS-DOS wasn't Courier like. It comes from the video hardware. * Here's a screenshot of Windows 1.0 showing the various fonts it ships with, you'll note the Terminal font is different from Courier. https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558 https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558 and in another video here https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154 https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154 -- you can see Windows 1.0 Notepad using non-Courier font. * Here's Notepad for Windows 3.1 -- https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613 https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613 Perhaps you'll take a break from ageism and provide some better examples? FWIW, I'm about 2 years younger than you.

sotojuan 10y ago

Is there a reason they put old, dumb memes in some of their imagery? http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_2017_logo_with_imagery.jpg http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_...

Raphmedia 10y ago
They seem to be going the "internet hipster mememaster" route.
rudolf0 10y ago
I winced.

tbirrell 10y ago

moz://a is interesting imagery as a protocol. But I still don't understand how this is any different for them. I just see a new site.

pcunite 10y ago
Makes me think of an automobile manufacture saying, "We've switched all the gas and brake pedals with each other. You're gonna love it!"

makecheck 10y ago

This is an example of something that is neat on the surface but completely blows up in practice, after even a few moments of consideration. First, what do you ask for in a query? Will some web sites choose to say “mozilla” and others “moz://a”, thereby splitting search traffic between the references? Just typing something like “moz://a” (even in a comment post such as this) might cause some sites or scrub-analyzers to assume that the text represents a valid URL of type "moz" and try to make it clickable and resolve to that URL type. Bonus points for the first malware to figure out how to hijack the "moz" URL type. What is their web site? Not "moz://a" but "https://www.mozilla.org" https://www.mozilla.org". Can anyone even type "moz://a" or "https://moz://a" https://moz://a"? Can’t wait for this to cause problems.

SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
I'm one of the people that are confused and tried moz://a in chrome and firefox.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I feel like this should have been an easter-egg before they went live.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    Easter egg coming soon, maybe? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=moz%3A%2F%2Fa https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=moz%3A%2F%2Fa
    - toyg 10y ago
      easter egg that won't work in any other browser, hence making it harder for people to find mozilla and switch. I just can't even
- Esau 10y ago
  When it saw it, I thought that perhaps they should change the configuration url from "about:" to "moz:". Also, the new logo reminded me of Curl.

lallysingh 10y ago

And this identity is Wired from the late 1990s. Not far off: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/ from: http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-biopeep/skaggs-stopbiopeep-wired-5-98-700-2/ http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-biopeep/skaggs-stopbiop...

128keaton 10y ago
It looks..interesting. WIRED got it right, though. I feel as if grandpa Mozilla got on iFunny and found some memes.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Yeah. The more I looked back at those old images, the more I realized how measured their use of unusual design was for solid effect.
  - 128keaton 10y ago
    it WAS cool not because it was, but because it wasn't, if that make sense

jwarzech 10y ago

Wow - this is actually sort of cringey. Reminds me a lot of what aol tried to do several years ago; manufactured coolness. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_generation_next.php http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_gene...

PerryCox 10y ago
Yep, plus the announcement makes it slightly harder to download Firefox. That seems like a bad idea to me.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Is anyone going to www.mozilla.org to download Firefox?
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    From time to time yes.
  - heimatau 10y ago
    I thought I was supposed download from http://moz://a http://moz://a . I couldn't download anything. /s(aracasm)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

andrei_says_ 10y ago

I tried typing www.moz:lla.org in the browser but it didn't work. What am I doing wrong? (I know what I'm doing wrong but not everyone would. Typing a brand's name in the browser in the hopes to get to their website is not illogical.)

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
You mistook the slashes ('/') for l's, try typing: www.moz://a.org
- Nizoss 10y ago
  Does this work only in Firefox? What does it show?
  - panglott 10y ago
    The top DuckDuckGo result was the Museum of Modern Art (moma.org).
- lima 10y ago
  It's not a valid URL so it goes to the Google search? :-)
- excalibur 10y ago
  "a.org" is apparently owned by "AutismAwareness.com", which is poor planning on Mozilla's part. I wish to know more about this "moz" protocol.
- andrei_says_ 10y ago
  You're right! Wait, this didn't work even more. (It's a great day for moz.com, the first result in my region) Humor aside, what a disaster. I love Mozilla so much, so a failure in any of its branding aspects is painful for me. I'm wondering, is this caused by "smart people's blindness" -- the inability to see the world through the eyes of less educated individuals? In this case, presuming that * everyone knows how urls work and the role of slashes and semicolon * everyone knows it's "mozilla" despite substituting letters for punctuation But Mozilla is a large organization... how did they do a full rebranding without focus groups or at least showing it to a varied types of people. Lastly, where's my dinosaur?

marcosdumay 10y ago

Oh, visual identity. I was expecting some project similar to Persona.

shmerl 10y ago
That was my first thought too...

mc42 10y ago

Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the best of their options. [0] I wish them the best of luck with their rebrand and hope they realize that they don't need to sink their limited funding into a redesign, but rather into making their main product( or products if you include Rust / Servo / pdf.js / Thunderbird) functional and efficient. Making a product that offers something that others don't attracts the gravitas of power users that they're seemingly attempting to cater to with Dev Tools and Firefox Developer Edition. I digress, best of luck to the Foundation! [0] - https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> the new logo was by far the best of their options The old logo was the least of their problems.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. There was nothing really recognizable about the dinosaur, nothing which people would connect to Mozilla, if they didn't already know the dinosaur anyways.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    I believe he's referring to the old "mozilla" logotype logo.
  - slrz 10y ago
    Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. Good. Then drop the marketing and start doing something useful.
djsumdog 10y ago
That was the link I was looking for. I agree, it was the best out of that selection. I agree with the others on here, the dinosaur was the best.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

exolymph 10y ago

This smacks of design for its own sake.

jdhendrickson 10y ago

Never has it been more apparent that strong leadership is lacking at the Mozilla foundation. This looks like some interns at an ad agency got the chance to take the lead.

johansch 10y ago
At least they are well-paid (by Yahoo (sigh)) and an army of well-meaning but out of touch contributors.
unethical_ban 10y ago
One side project occurred that you think is unnecessary. So that means there is no leadership? Is the person who designed this also setting technical direction or approving new software?
- dpark 10y ago
  Corporate rebranding is a side project now?

sehr 10y ago

Think it looks decent, boringish logo offset by a nice little color scheme. Won't be winning any awards, but eh

dang 10y ago

We changed the url from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw, since HN generally prefers text to video.

mei0Iesh 10y ago

Not that my opinion matters, but just to document it: I at first thought this was a new project, something having to do with identity. I clicked, and saw some messy images like someone was playing in GIMP. I looked at the logo, and it wasn't a word, but it also made no technical sense. I tried to parse it, but it doesn't parse. This caused me to feel discord. Then I looked at the whole thing again, and said out loud, "What the fuck is that?" Whatever it is, I don't like it. I didn't know Mozilla had an identity problem. I see at the top, the title, in all lower case is, "internet for people, not pr..." Hovering the title I see it's "not profit". I'm sorry but that makes your identity worse to me. I remember the dinosaur looking head with "mozilla" wasn't particularly professional, but it didn't seem to matter. It was fine. This new one hurts my brain. The slogan sounds like something from a teenager trying to rebel. I don't even know what it means. Internet for people? That's what the internet is, for people. That tells me nothing about Mozilla, except that they don't want profit. Which makes it sound like they're going to fail, because that's not even a good attitude to have. You profit if you're producing value and sharing it with people in a fair way that people love. This new identity seems to me like a grumpy uncool guy who is pissed he's uncool so decided his New Year's resolution was to change that. This is his makeover. His attempt to dress himself up and finally win the cool friends. But that tells me I wasn't enough as a friend. I've used Firefox forever. I never hated Mozilla, except I thought it was unfair when that CEO was forced to resign over his personal beliefs. I thought that was none of my business and nothing to do with the software. But I don't like words I c@n/t read. Micro$oft at least looks like a letter, please don't use s/ashes and co:ons in a w:0(o)r//d. But whatever. Soon I'll go back to not caring like the dinosaur. I'll recognize it from the pattern and not try to read it. Nothing much will change. You are who you are, and a wardrobe and new attitude won't make you popular. But good luck.

kukx 10y ago

I'm curious - why the new identity was needed? And what benefits can it bring? Currently I lean towards the opinion that it's just a mismanagement (especially looking at the final effect). I hope it's not true, because we really need a healthy, independent and privacy concious organization that provides a trustworthy browser.

callahad 10y ago
We're trying to bring Mozilla itself out from behind the shadow of Firefox, almost the inverse of when RIM renamed themselves Blackberry.

agumonkey 10y ago

The article makes me cringe hard. Browsing the page feels a tad better. I don't associate Mozilla with anthropoligical notions of web. To me they ship open products that incarnates the values, not brand and aesthetics. All in all I think it's 99% unnecessary and deviates attention from beautiful things like rust, mdn.

russellbeattie 10y ago

Heh... The irony of using Tim Berners-Lee's biggest regret - the :// - as the main logo element is quite amusing. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-...

newscracker 10y ago

I like the new Mozilla logo! I realized it's a logo and didn't type it as a URL to see if anything would happen. But I'm not sure if people who're not familiar with Mozilla (compared to the larger number of people familiar with the Firefox name) would be able to read the logo and get which company it belongs to. That's the brand marketing part, and needs to be done strongly. For all its faults, shortcomings and failures in certain experiments, I still love Mozilla and what it stands for!

Vinnl 10y ago
They've tested it with "regular" people that fall into their target audience, so it probably works well enough for that. https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

mjolk 10y ago

With a side order of trying to cash-in/virtue-signal on "inclusion" (watch the carousel and read the tone of their landing page copy) as per recent blog posts and projects[1]. Mozilla's technology and their niche place in the internet ecosystem put them in the "hacker", in the traditional sense of the word, realm in (at least) my mind, where ideas matter and not identity politics -- this rebrand sells they idea that they're more focused on marketing and image than progress. Good luck folks, but you can keep your politics; my default is now suspicion of your content. 1) https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ (the text, source materials are a nightmare)

tobr 10y ago
What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean? I see it thrown around all the time. It's such a vague and weird way to criticize something, but it seems to represent something that make a lot of people very upset. I looked at the carousel images at mozilla.org and skimmed the article about anonymity to try to decipher what you mean, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Could you be more specific – what is the "virtue signal", and why is it so problematic?
- mark_edward 10y ago
  Virtue signaling is term that had some scientific use but is mostly used online by people who don't like your morals, values, etc. Accuse you of doing if you display them at all in a public place. It's meant to be used to shut down anything but the most bland and status quo morality, by turning the simple act of showing any values at all into something nefarious instead something almost universal Someone says they want to hire more women, accuse of virtue signaling, rinse repeat. The thing is it works for literally any normative content.
  - tobr 10y ago
    Thanks. This makes me even more curious what were the values represented by the photos in the carousel, prompting mjolk to call them out as virtue signalling.

jlgaddis 10y ago

Wow. Just... wow. I think it's time to remove the Mozilla Foundation from the list of organizations I donate to. Apparently they've got enough money already, if blowing all these resources on this project is any indication. I remember when they announced their "short list" of "concepts" several months ago and thinking then how terrible they were. This reeks of "design by committee" more than anything I've seen in recent times.

callahad 10y ago
I believe this project was funded by the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), which is a separate, wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (MoFo). You can read more about MoFo at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/ Your donations go directly to, and stay within, the Foundation.

Animats 10y ago

They really needed to lose the dinosaur, but this isn't an improvement.

arbitrage 10y ago
The dinosaur was recognizable and unique, with a long history associated with the company. Why did it need to change?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton of money.
  - toyg 10y ago
    License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean, whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.

pcunite 10y ago

We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet. I want to be known for not being snarky on the Internet. This is accomplished by doing, not announcing. An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and innovate without barriers or limitations. Warning: anyone who says it like this is probably going to do the exact opposite. What they mean is: anyone who does not disagree with us, is free to explore, discover, create, and innovate. The rest will be silenced as disruptive and harmful. Also commas are nice.

Groxx 10y ago

Not flashy, just text. Thank God. This might age well, and it's as trivial as it gets to create a branded-button / link.

trhway 10y ago

when your product starts to significantly fall behind and/or decline in usability, performance and quality - rebrand. "Creative strategizing" and "concepting" - telltales sign of the environment there.

pdog 10y ago

Isn't there already an internet company called moz? This just looks like moz followed by symbol swearing (#?*!). https://moz.com/ https://moz.com/

EastSmith 10y ago

I think that Mozilla should just fork Chrome, fix the privacy for everyone and go home.

5ilv3r 10y ago
mozilla is just as bad as chrome now. Checkout all the call home URLs in about:config some time. There are dozens of features that are on by default calling home all the time. I tried to sanitize my phone once to save bandwidth, but ended up giving up and installing gnu icecat.

Andrew_Ssss 10y ago

The problem is one of literalness. Most designers (and many laypeople) will look at colon-forward-slash-forward-slash and easily see "ill," while many people who still type in URLs and use colons and forward slashes outside of sentences and they see those literal characters. It wouldn't be a problem if so many of Mozilla's target users didn't fall into that second group. This is a visual identity solution that is clever at first glance, and which seems especially clever to non-technologists, but shouldn't have made it all the way to market. There's a series of gates similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that a visual design should progress. One of the first three gates, even for a logotype, should be usability. It seems like the new Mozilla logo fails the usability test for enough core users to be a problem. It's cool to see designers take chances. You live and learn. I, personally, don't think their old identity was the thing holding them back, but new CMOs/CDOs love a visual rebranding. Nothing says this is now MY house more than a fresh coat of paint!

belvoran 10y ago

Well, people will just write Mozilla... because that's what they know, and a standard human doesn't want to learn. That's why they usually use FF for Firefox, although it's one word, and the official abbreviation is Fx. Promoting this change will cost millions. I hope this is not the same case, but when I was working on lots of places, and there was a manager who didn't have any results, he usually proposed things like this one. Useless, not needed, confusing clients, and extremely expensive. Then the upper management, who usually was not very technical, and couldn't understand our changelogs, was very happy with this change. Maybe because this was the only thing they could fully understand. This kind of change usually was something like: changing the name of the main product, the name of the company, or changing the official colors (which included a new logo, new website, lots of new printed materials). Did I say that this manager was promoted?

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

I think this is what pisses me off when I see these big redesigns from companies. I am a front-end web developer who never wanted to be a front-end web developer. I wanted to be a designer (UX specifically). In order to get a job as a designer, you need a portfolio, preferably with shipped products. So I then create said portfolio to show of my designs (which I also developed because designs are nothing if they aren't implemented). However, with my fancy new portfolio (and still to this day), I can't seem to find me a design job, but I sure can find myself a front-end web position. I definitely would be happier in life if I was a designer. So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job?

devopsproject 10y ago
> So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job? Because it faster and cheaper to pay one person to do both the design and the work to make it a reality. There is also a supply and demand issue. Too many designers, not enough front-end devs (which is why you can easily find jobs as an employee) if you want to be a designer only, I would suggest striking out on your own and hiring out for the work you dislike.
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
  I have been working on a plan to make this happen. Soon hopefully! :)
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    good luck!

etjossem 10y ago

From a recent Bugzilla entry: "REALLY ought to register 'moz' with IANA as well. Otherwise it might pop up as a 'real' protocol declaration in the future and we might have a conflict. We can just reserve the prefix so that it's not available for general use." I hope they do this soon.

Wyverald 10y ago
Alternatively, when a protocol "moz://" does pop up, they can just register the domain 'a'.

synicalx 10y ago

So when you search for 'moz://a' you wind up hearing all about moz.com.... Old mate Randy is probably pretty stoked about this.

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

Is the logo gone? It wasn't gone a couple of hours ago

zatkin 10y ago

They did a pretty terrible job of getting the logo dispersed across their entire website. Just visiting the About page will lead you back to the old header: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

pmontra 10y ago

Firefox Android, typed moz://a in the search bar, tap to search. Blank page, nothing happens. Congratulations for the new brand. Much fashion, very SEO.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mtanski 10y ago

design happened

shmerl 10y ago

I liked this identity quite a bit: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html

NamTaf 10y ago

Good lord it's atrocious. Either I see the :/ face or I consciously feel my brain strain to parse it in full because decades of web experience have taught me to ignore the left side of the :// unless I'm specifically interested in the security of the connection to the endpoint. Using non-alphabetic characters in a logo requires a pretty careful execution. An old ISP here used to be Optus@Home. I could parse that fine because it was fairly balanced, relatively minimal and reads smoothly (say it out loud and it is perfectly pronouncable, so reading it in your head is similarly effortless). In contrast, moz://a both looks weird (the / stand far higher than the alphabetic characters in most fonts, there's 3 letters on one side and 1 on the other), it's mentally taxing (how do I pronounce ://? oh wait, that's right, I need to parse it as 'ill' when reading it in my mind's voice. I also need to remember when focusing on it in isolation not to parse it as a smiley like decades of internet usage has conditioned me to. This is the same effect as when you see <3 in some maths/code and parse it as 'heart' rather than 'less than three') and it doesn't smoothly parse as a standalone thing like @ does as 'at'. I really don't like it.

debt 10y ago

i dig the rebrand. it's oddly timeless.

reallymozilla 10y ago

Wait, what was wrong with their old branding? The new typeface is fine, but that :// is cringe-worthy. Kewl, mozilla, very kewl.

mcbits 10y ago

This design looks really old-school and amateurish, like it should be a blinking marquee on Mozilla's first Geocities page. I personally like old-school techie nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that this sort of branding will backfire (assuming branding has any effect at all) for an organization that pushes "progress" in many ways.