You probably know Mozilla for a number of distinct reasons; at one point you probably used their popular (or formerly popular??) Mozilla Firefox browser. If not that then you know them as the guys with the very cool logo – the one with the curled fox and what not. If not the cool logo there might be an off-chance that you know them as the guys who tried to make a mobile operating systems (remember Firefox OS anyone?) and failed dismally.
New look
Anyway, my point is you probably know Mozilla and recently they have made the news for something I think is really rare. Mozilla is rebranding and the unique part of their rebranding is they are actually asking for the public’s opinion. Usually rebranding campaigns work in a weird way. A company makes most of their moves in the background and then they make a grand announcement of their new look. I’m certainly no logo expert, but from what I have seen there’s a lot of backlash and people don’t really warm to these new designs quickly. A good example I can give is Absa (the South African bank). They recently rebranded and a quick Google search of “Absa rebranding” had a post questioning the design ranking highest:
Mozilla has found a way of avoiding all this backlash that comes with a rebranding; they are asking the public to contribute. They have placed two new design sets and they are asking users to give feedback on the designs. This is a cool way of building the Mozilla community and is a good way of giving users what they want. It could also be a way of absolving themselves of the blame if things go pear-shaped but from a less negative perspective.
Why rebrand?
Well, Firefox is no longer just a browser now and they are moving into different offerings and the rebranding campaign is supposed to put this across. If you’re wondering what these other offerings actually include; it’s a VR browser and gaming applications and they also plan to launch mobile applications down the line.
According to Mozilla the current icon was inadequate:
As an icon, that fast fox with a flaming tail doesn’t offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family. Recoloring that logo or dissecting the fox could only take us so far. We needed to start from a new place.
If you’re a user, a design junky, or really just interested you are welcome to comment on their blog post and play your part.
2 comments
Hi, Good day. How to enter? thanks
By enter, do you mean enter the blog? If yes you can use the link below:
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-brand/
If, however, you mean enter as in submitting a design then unfortunately that’s not possible. Individuals can only give advice and feedback on designs that have been proposed already by Mozilla.