Not a single one of them looks better than the one they already have and at least half of them are awful. Besides the name makes way more sense with the dinosaur logo.
I entirely concur. I don't see why they think they need a re-branding either. It's more like they need a strategy to compete with chrome. Or at least one successful project other than Firefox.
That's the thing, though, a huge portion of the success of Chrome is not caused by it being a particularly good browser, but rather by it being bundled with other software or advertised for on the world's most popular webpage.
For Mozilla to be able to compete with that by purely being technologically superior, they'd have to be so ridiculously good that Chrome would look like Internet Explorer 6 in comparison. As long as that's not the case, it's hard to tell people to switch to Firefox, because it still is subjective which the better browser is.
So, they have to do some form of advertising, and a recognizable branding can help with that.
How again is advertising ( which Google is in a much better position to do anyways ) going to get people choose a Browser which as you pointed out is not technically superior and requires additional steps for users to install?
Originally I thought their strategy was to offer an alternative ecosystem (Persona, Thunderbird) which could potentially have matured in integration with Firefox to provide a better experience than on Chrome (maybe they also could have purchased Evernote or some similar product that benefits greatly from a dedicated ecosystem). But they killed off the former two and failed with FirefoxOS, so I have no idea what their strategy is at this point ( probably most of their market-share is exactly those that switched to Firefox when the choice was firefox vs. ie6 but that's a constantly diminishing segment ).
By advertising not for being technologically superior, but by getting people to realize that hey, maybe you don't want to stick all of your data into that proprietary hole where the biggest advertising company in the world sits on the other end.
That's something which is hard to explain in person, but can be communicated rather well as a general message.
> but by getting people to realize that hey, maybe you don't want to stick all of your data into that proprietary hole where the biggest advertising company in the world sits on the other end.
That argument works for maybe 1% of browser users - that's not nearly enough to support Mozilla. That said having a dedicated user-base that really doesn't want to switch helps a lot but it seems to me like they are blowing by failing to do anything for the rest of users.
I think, you underestimate for how many people this works.
Non-technical people very much orient themselves based on what they know they can trust. If they don't understand the consequences of something, they will try to err on the safe side. See for example anti-virus software.
This will is not terribly strong, as even already having to remember a few more letters in a password can completely shatter it, but in the case of Firefox vs. Chrome, that difference is practically nonexistent for the average user, so being told to use Firefox, because it's safer for you, for reasons that you don't understand, but smart people say it, so it's probably true, that can very much influence them to switch over.
I switched to Chrome because it is great. Most other people I know switched to it was because it is great.
Firefox was very good at one point but really was yo-yoing in quality about the time when chrome was released. It does seem a lot better now, but Chrome is still high quality.
It's funny, but such a similar concept as used in the Curl logo looks really professional. I'd not seen their new logo before. The typeface, the hint to pcb tracks, makes it work really well. I like it a lot!
So I went back for a longer, closer, look. I dug into every logo's individual page. The FB mockups reveal much.
Moz:// is the best of a horrible bunch, but apart from making me think strongly of another web brand, it's bland. They're all expressed as though someone just got their hands on MS Publisher.
The connector, utterly meaningless and indecipherable. Particularly with the colour choices, makes me think of another Google app icon, like Picasa. Reminds me of BA's universally derided 1990s £50m tail art redesign (It didn't last long).
Open button is some random control on a Chinese media player. Another "universal" icon rather than logo.
Of the rest they have no redeeming features, to my eyes, whatsoever.
Yeah, lowercase "mozilla" is pretty much their current logo, often in combination with the rounded shape that tabs in Firefox have.
The dinosaur sort of exists still, but it's essentially never used in publicity work and I doubt that anyone outside of tech could recognize it. I mean, it's too generic anyways. No one who doesn't happen to know that that dinosaur is the exact dinosaur that Mozilla uses, will recognize it as logo for Mozilla. They will just think that it's a random dinosaur.
And while I personally like "mozilla" and like it better as any of the designs shown here, I can understand why they want to switch it out. "mozilla" is not terribly recognizable and doesn't pop into the eye. Also takes a lot of space on a poster or similar.
If you look on the mozilla site they've gone to great lengths to remove the dino branding already, which is a shame, as who didn't like the dino guy?
That said, who cares about mozilla's logo? If this was the firefox logo, that'd matter a bit more, but in the end, this is just a bunch of costly big company bs that matters very little.
I understand that all organisations with a certain size tend to develop some sort of silly politics and bureaucratic workflows. But Mozilla seams to have a awful lot of nonsense going on in the last few years.
I think that's his point. It would have been a better use of their money doing something like that, than something so utterly pointless as this.
And I'd even excuse this exercise in branding if the results were actually good...but alas.
Keep in mind I absolutely value good design and branding. I think it's critical. So I'm not just some curmudgeon who doesn't understand the value of something like this. But if you're going to do a rebrand, you have to understand deeply why you're doing it and do it in a way that's evolutionary. This is way too revolutionary for a foundation that mostly stays in the background and whose brand is held up by the brand of it's products like Firefox moreso than it's own brand.
> Do you really think a desktop mail client is where Mozilla should be investing?
Yes! A thousand times Yes! The first paragraph of Mozilla's mission statement[1] reads "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent"
Email is still a very important and unsolved part of the internet, but Mozilla has dropped the ball and is instead doubling down on IoT and other peripheral projects. I don't see any other email client or email provider in existance that empowers the individuals the way Mozilla could, which is a crying shame.
It looks like a bunch of amateurs aping trendy styles instead of servicing the Mozilla brand. Harsh language, but I would have never guessed the proposals would be so flippant when opening the link.
I didn't even realize that the old dino logo had been phased out until I read this post. I liked that logo a lot - it had a timeless quality to it.
I don't think that any of these replacements are particularly bad (except perhaps for that eye one...), but none seem to really capture the mental image of "Mozilla".
Google designed their logo and branding following the Alphabet transition, but kept the 'G' and color scheme to link users back to the original branding. Mozilla would do well to follow suit.
Edit: That's from this interesting history page "How was Mozilla born: The story of the first mascot on the Internet"
http://www.davetitus.com/mozilla/
I actually had no idea that that green dino (lizard?) was the first Mozilla. I've seen it around the Internet before, but I never made the connection.
Thanks for the link, this looks like a great read! And yes, I think an allusion to either would in in good taste on the part of the Mozilla design team.
The sluggish browser, outdated mail client, useless Hello integration, and misguided Pocket bundling have done more to "brand" Mozilla for me than some new vector art.
No chance if done single-handedly or by a tiny group. I believe, most forks end up dead in some months (if ever synced with upstream).
It's no big deal to fork a project and write some code. Yet, it's requires a tremendous effort to maintain it and keep up with all the upstream changes.
(I wonder if there's enough of community bothered by ever-increasing infestation of the browser by Mozilla's own proprietary technologies - e.g. anything related to "Firefox Account" - to start a schism.)
What? Don't donate to Mozilla - this whole story is about how they are wasting money instead of focusing on what's important. When one donates it should be about doing the most good with their money and unless it's $1M+, it won't make a dent in Mozilla's output.
While I personally love Moz://a, I don't think any of these designs will help iconify the message and strengths of the Mozilla Foundation to the general public.
After clicking the link it actually took me a few minutes to realize that those graphics I saw were not just some stock images meant to give the blog post some color but that they are the actual proposals for a new mozilla logo...
Well I guess this list [1] needs an update and 7 more logos added...
Which of these initial visual expressions best captures what Mozilla means to you? Which will best help us tell our story to a youthful, values-driven audience? Which brings to life the Mozilla personality: Gutsy, Independent, Buoyant, For Good?
I want the dino back. The combination of the in-joke name and logo gave Mozilla personality. It talked more about them more than any carefully designed and full of pointless metaphors new logo will ever do.
After reading the explanation for the eye-logo, it's sort of my favorite, as it has the most character and fits Mozilla's message best, in my opinion.
However. When I first saw the logo, I thought of Eye of Sauron, the all-overlooking eye which sees everything you do. And that doesn't represent Mozilla at all.
The last one (flik/flak) might work well with the new browserhtml UX for servo, 3d navigation, breaking away from the traditional forward/back buttons ironically echoed in the "open" design.
As another comment mentioned, why not start with Firefox which has had the same branding since Ian introduced it in a blog post probably over a decade ago.
Simplify the logo to nearly dichromatic, with subtle depth cues.
Beyond that the brand has to be about something, like a faster more open web in the past, and possibly privacy and security should be added now.
Edge seems to be stalling, Chrome is fast but the core (blink) is becoming outdated as is Gecko. ("Next-generation layout" as it was called back when XPCOM was a thing.)
Battery life matters in mobile and that's something that WebRender can improve with the right driver support.
The other opportunity here is privacy, improve the extension API and the network layer to support filters, making Firefox the ad-blocking friendly browser. This woulsd be faster than a SOCKS proxy, avoid the extra copies and context switches.
Talk about the "advanced security" and how the latest standards are supported on all platforms, unlike IE or Chrome.
Consider introducing a new HTML-based UX on the Gecko-based browser along with process isolation and Rust components.
Simplify the UX to match Chrome, but introduce new extension points using web components or the like. Chrome has extensions that can "read any page", Firefox could limit them to pages they are activated on by user action. It should be possible to have extensions that cannot access "chrome" features, such as file IO or socket IO.
Maybe have a specific area in the UX where page actions can be registered, similar to the old CSS stylesheet picker in early versions of Firefox. This would avoid browser toolbars and other things that slow Firefox down over time.
"The Eye" - Right off the bat, obfuscating the brand name like this is a bad idea. Look around on Logopedia [1] for a while and you'll notice that most corporate branding spells the company name out clearly. There's a reason for this. As beautiful as your stylized, geometric typography may look, it takes too long to get the point across. Human perception is variable; state your name loud and proud so all hear it. Further, yellow is a risky color in this case. It is traditionally used to evoke "sunny" feels but is more commonly associated with "caution" on the Internet. I also get this anxious feeling from the Eye of Mordor motif which reminds me of Internet surveillance more than it does freedom.
"The Connector" - I quite like the concept behind this one. One of the aspects of free software that I believe we take for granted is that open collaboration brings people together from all countries and cultures to solve common problems. I think the theme of "unity" is communicated effectively here with a fairly appealing minimalist design. My main criticism is in the geometry of the multicolored logo. The shapes are incongruent in their direction and give the larger logo a chaotic pull.
"Open button" - Once again, I like the concept of bringing people together. Unfortunately, this one just doesn't appeal to my tastes at all. The colors (which do not complement each other) and stroke come together in a very loud logo that not a lot of people are going to associate with "openness" (I'm not sure if that "open" icon is a standard or something the designer conceived of, but I don't recognize it). If I had to pick one word to describe this logo, it would be "garish". Tone it down and tighten it up.
"Protocol" - Nice touch with the `://`. As an alternate logo used in the context of API documentation, technical wikis, etc., I quite like it. However, I'll refer back to the obfuscation argument I made with "The Eye". You really want your corporate branding to convey that brand name as efficiently as possible. Again, eliminate any perceptual barriers to entry. This logo empathizes with English-speaking techies but doesn't necessarily translate well to other markets. If evangelizing free software is part of Mozilla's mission statement, they might find it beneficial to do so outside of the circles already using it. This logo falls short in that regard.
"Wireframe world" - Style without substance. Look at the IBM logo designed by Paul Rand [2]. It's strong and industrial while also having that little touch of personality that tells the story of IBM as a technology company - the scanlines. This visual cue is done so in a way that allows "IBM" to still be easily read at all distance. Compare that to this "Wireframe world" logo. The brand name isn't what is front-and-center here. Instead we get some lousy shape that tries to conveys an "M" and maybe a network? Either way, it's visually and conceptually unclear and not suitable for a corporate logo.
"The Impossible M" - This one's okay. Obviously M.C. Escher inspired, evokes the idea of technology that once seemed impossible. I enjoy what the designer is going for here. Compositionally it's very bold and works at a distance better than maybe any of the other logos. As far as my criticisms go, it looks a little stretched out. Maybe play with the proportions a bit. The colors look like they were rendered by a 1980s CGA graphics card. Try to go for a less saturated palette. I'm also not sold on the "MOZILLA" typography. The capitalization and kerning don't work well, although maybe it's the font itself.
"Flik Flak" - Refer to my comments about "Wireframe world". This is just more geometric trite that doesn't effectively communicate anything about Mozilla. The r...
62 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadFor Mozilla to be able to compete with that by purely being technologically superior, they'd have to be so ridiculously good that Chrome would look like Internet Explorer 6 in comparison. As long as that's not the case, it's hard to tell people to switch to Firefox, because it still is subjective which the better browser is.
So, they have to do some form of advertising, and a recognizable branding can help with that.
Originally I thought their strategy was to offer an alternative ecosystem (Persona, Thunderbird) which could potentially have matured in integration with Firefox to provide a better experience than on Chrome (maybe they also could have purchased Evernote or some similar product that benefits greatly from a dedicated ecosystem). But they killed off the former two and failed with FirefoxOS, so I have no idea what their strategy is at this point ( probably most of their market-share is exactly those that switched to Firefox when the choice was firefox vs. ie6 but that's a constantly diminishing segment ).
That's something which is hard to explain in person, but can be communicated rather well as a general message.
That argument works for maybe 1% of browser users - that's not nearly enough to support Mozilla. That said having a dedicated user-base that really doesn't want to switch helps a lot but it seems to me like they are blowing by failing to do anything for the rest of users.
Non-technical people very much orient themselves based on what they know they can trust. If they don't understand the consequences of something, they will try to err on the safe side. See for example anti-virus software.
This will is not terribly strong, as even already having to remember a few more letters in a password can completely shatter it, but in the case of Firefox vs. Chrome, that difference is practically nonexistent for the average user, so being told to use Firefox, because it's safer for you, for reasons that you don't understand, but smart people say it, so it's probably true, that can very much influence them to switch over.
Firefox was very good at one point but really was yo-yoing in quality about the time when chrome was released. It does seem a lot better now, but Chrome is still high quality.
They earned their spot.
I rather like the Moz://a logo. Beyond geeky, beyond clever. Maybe too clever, I dunno.
So I went back for a longer, closer, look. I dug into every logo's individual page. The FB mockups reveal much.
Moz:// is the best of a horrible bunch, but apart from making me think strongly of another web brand, it's bland. They're all expressed as though someone just got their hands on MS Publisher.
The connector, utterly meaningless and indecipherable. Particularly with the colour choices, makes me think of another Google app icon, like Picasa. Reminds me of BA's universally derided 1990s £50m tail art redesign (It didn't last long).
Open button is some random control on a Chinese media player. Another "universal" icon rather than logo.
Of the rest they have no redeeming features, to my eyes, whatsoever.
The dinosaur sort of exists still, but it's essentially never used in publicity work and I doubt that anyone outside of tech could recognize it. I mean, it's too generic anyways. No one who doesn't happen to know that that dinosaur is the exact dinosaur that Mozilla uses, will recognize it as logo for Mozilla. They will just think that it's a random dinosaur.
And while I personally like "mozilla" and like it better as any of the designs shown here, I can understand why they want to switch it out. "mozilla" is not terribly recognizable and doesn't pop into the eye. Also takes a lot of space on a poster or similar.
Translation: you better not change it.
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/#co...
That said, who cares about mozilla's logo? If this was the firefox logo, that'd matter a bit more, but in the end, this is just a bunch of costly big company bs that matters very little.
I really like the dino. I remember the early Mozilla releases based on Netscape 6 and how it had the dino-logo in that fading pattern for page loads.
Come to think of it...I totally forgot we lost the page loading icon ages ago. It's a part of the tab icon now. Oh nostalgia:
https://media.giphy.com/media/anjRJ4nv9WJzO/giphy.gif
I understand that all organisations with a certain size tend to develop some sort of silly politics and bureaucratic workflows. But Mozilla seams to have a awful lot of nonsense going on in the last few years.
And I'd even excuse this exercise in branding if the results were actually good...but alas.
Keep in mind I absolutely value good design and branding. I think it's critical. So I'm not just some curmudgeon who doesn't understand the value of something like this. But if you're going to do a rebrand, you have to understand deeply why you're doing it and do it in a way that's evolutionary. This is way too revolutionary for a foundation that mostly stays in the background and whose brand is held up by the brand of it's products like Firefox moreso than it's own brand.
Yes! A thousand times Yes! The first paragraph of Mozilla's mission statement[1] reads "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent"
Email is still a very important and unsolved part of the internet, but Mozilla has dropped the ball and is instead doubling down on IoT and other peripheral projects. I don't see any other email client or email provider in existance that empowers the individuals the way Mozilla could, which is a crying shame.
1.https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
More like they're all duds. Terrible, unless it was just a student doodling while learning design.
The Moz://a one instantly makes me think there is a new product from Rand Fishkin's Moz.com (formerly seomoz).
I don't think that any of these replacements are particularly bad (except perhaps for that eye one...), but none seem to really capture the mental image of "Mozilla".
Google designed their logo and branding following the Alphabet transition, but kept the 'G' and color scheme to link users back to the original branding. Mozilla would do well to follow suit.
Edit: That's from this interesting history page "How was Mozilla born: The story of the first mascot on the Internet" http://www.davetitus.com/mozilla/
Thanks for the link, this looks like a great read! And yes, I think an allusion to either would in in good taste on the part of the Mozilla design team.
Donate https://donate.mozilla.org or contribute some code instead of complaining.
I have plenty of contributions I could make, but they're all about -50,000 LOC and they won't get merged.
It's no big deal to fork a project and write some code. Yet, it's requires a tremendous effort to maintain it and keep up with all the upstream changes.
(I wonder if there's enough of community bothered by ever-increasing infestation of the browser by Mozilla's own proprietary technologies - e.g. anything related to "Firefox Account" - to start a schism.)
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cat%20waxing
Well I guess this list [1] needs an update and 7 more logos added...
[1]: http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-logo-fails-ever/
https://developer.cdn.mozilla.net/static/img/opengraph-logo....
https://takebacktheweb.production.paas.mozilla.community/wp-...
However. When I first saw the logo, I thought of Eye of Sauron, the all-overlooking eye which sees everything you do. And that doesn't represent Mozilla at all.
See the screenshot/mockup here
https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml/blob/master/brows...
As another comment mentioned, why not start with Firefox which has had the same branding since Ian introduced it in a blog post probably over a decade ago.
Simplify the logo to nearly dichromatic, with subtle depth cues.
Beyond that the brand has to be about something, like a faster more open web in the past, and possibly privacy and security should be added now.
Edge seems to be stalling, Chrome is fast but the core (blink) is becoming outdated as is Gecko. ("Next-generation layout" as it was called back when XPCOM was a thing.)
Battery life matters in mobile and that's something that WebRender can improve with the right driver support.
The other opportunity here is privacy, improve the extension API and the network layer to support filters, making Firefox the ad-blocking friendly browser. This woulsd be faster than a SOCKS proxy, avoid the extra copies and context switches.
Talk about the "advanced security" and how the latest standards are supported on all platforms, unlike IE or Chrome.
Consider introducing a new HTML-based UX on the Gecko-based browser along with process isolation and Rust components.
Simplify the UX to match Chrome, but introduce new extension points using web components or the like. Chrome has extensions that can "read any page", Firefox could limit them to pages they are activated on by user action. It should be possible to have extensions that cannot access "chrome" features, such as file IO or socket IO.
Maybe have a specific area in the UX where page actions can be registered, similar to the old CSS stylesheet picker in early versions of Firefox. This would avoid browser toolbars and other things that slow Firefox down over time.
"The Eye" - Right off the bat, obfuscating the brand name like this is a bad idea. Look around on Logopedia [1] for a while and you'll notice that most corporate branding spells the company name out clearly. There's a reason for this. As beautiful as your stylized, geometric typography may look, it takes too long to get the point across. Human perception is variable; state your name loud and proud so all hear it. Further, yellow is a risky color in this case. It is traditionally used to evoke "sunny" feels but is more commonly associated with "caution" on the Internet. I also get this anxious feeling from the Eye of Mordor motif which reminds me of Internet surveillance more than it does freedom.
"The Connector" - I quite like the concept behind this one. One of the aspects of free software that I believe we take for granted is that open collaboration brings people together from all countries and cultures to solve common problems. I think the theme of "unity" is communicated effectively here with a fairly appealing minimalist design. My main criticism is in the geometry of the multicolored logo. The shapes are incongruent in their direction and give the larger logo a chaotic pull.
"Open button" - Once again, I like the concept of bringing people together. Unfortunately, this one just doesn't appeal to my tastes at all. The colors (which do not complement each other) and stroke come together in a very loud logo that not a lot of people are going to associate with "openness" (I'm not sure if that "open" icon is a standard or something the designer conceived of, but I don't recognize it). If I had to pick one word to describe this logo, it would be "garish". Tone it down and tighten it up.
"Protocol" - Nice touch with the `://`. As an alternate logo used in the context of API documentation, technical wikis, etc., I quite like it. However, I'll refer back to the obfuscation argument I made with "The Eye". You really want your corporate branding to convey that brand name as efficiently as possible. Again, eliminate any perceptual barriers to entry. This logo empathizes with English-speaking techies but doesn't necessarily translate well to other markets. If evangelizing free software is part of Mozilla's mission statement, they might find it beneficial to do so outside of the circles already using it. This logo falls short in that regard.
"Wireframe world" - Style without substance. Look at the IBM logo designed by Paul Rand [2]. It's strong and industrial while also having that little touch of personality that tells the story of IBM as a technology company - the scanlines. This visual cue is done so in a way that allows "IBM" to still be easily read at all distance. Compare that to this "Wireframe world" logo. The brand name isn't what is front-and-center here. Instead we get some lousy shape that tries to conveys an "M" and maybe a network? Either way, it's visually and conceptually unclear and not suitable for a corporate logo.
"The Impossible M" - This one's okay. Obviously M.C. Escher inspired, evokes the idea of technology that once seemed impossible. I enjoy what the designer is going for here. Compositionally it's very bold and works at a distance better than maybe any of the other logos. As far as my criticisms go, it looks a little stretched out. Maybe play with the proportions a bit. The colors look like they were rendered by a 1980s CGA graphics card. Try to go for a less saturated palette. I'm also not sold on the "MOZILLA" typography. The capitalization and kerning don't work well, although maybe it's the font itself.
"Flik Flak" - Refer to my comments about "Wireframe world". This is just more geometric trite that doesn't effectively communicate anything about Mozilla. The r...
Yellow/Black one is just Kill Bill's branding. And what kind of message is Sauron's eye in a logo?
Moz:// is interesting but as the :/ emoticone in it, that's everything I can see
I don't even know where to begin with the connector, open button, wireframe and the impossible M, were they designed like 30 years ago?
Flik Flak is ok I guess, but doesn't inspire me much
All in all, I like their current logo, I have no clue why they would change it