I've been lucky enough to be involved in the recent rebranding process of Mozilla's Firefox project. When my cohort Steven Garrity was asked by the Mozilla organization to gather a team of designers to work on the rebranding of Firebird to Firefox a few months ago, I managed to kind of sneak in. The whole process of the renaming and new branding has been fascinating and there has been some truly fantastic work done by the team of volunteers.
The logo, in particular, has been a process of evolution from a crappy marker-board illustration, to Stephen Desroches' pencil drawing, to Jon Hicks' great illustration guided by the feedback of the rest of the team. Jon has outlined much of the process on his own weblog with examples.
For those of you who have never heard of Firefox (or its previous version Firebird), it's a great web browser that's easy to use and is much better in most respects to Internet Explorer. If you're still using IE, give Firefox a try (it's free!) and you certainly won't be going back!
Comments
filmgoerjuan - February 9, 2004 1:15 pm
Congratulations on all your hard work, Daniel...Firebird has been my default browser for about a year (and Mozilla before that). I only hope that they'll stick with the name for good this time -- even though I'd prefer Firebird :(
Awesome - February 9, 2004 1:19 pm
I've been waiting anxiously for this release :-)
Great job!
em - February 9, 2004 3:44 pm
crikies, what a blindingly beautiful new icon! call it firebird, firefox or firebagel, i don't care, it's THE browser of choice and it's managed to depants IE for many of us.
and this blog itself is gorgeous, the red, the dark gray and the lovely header font, i'm in awe. so much work that has excited me in the last year has been equal parts layout and colors.
thank you !
Mandy - February 10, 2004 3:49 am
Well done Daniel and Stephen. That logo is extremely sharp.
Pekka Tolvanen - October 13, 2005 8:02 am
The FF logo is really superb! In Finnish folklore we have (this is how I've heard it anyway) a story about the origin of aurora borealis: the northern lights - or fox fires, as we call them - are sparks from the running Firefox's (a mythical fox, not a red panda) tail, as it hits the trees and the snow. Then again the firefox in the logo seems to be spreading flames into the skies as well. I believe this wasn't in your mind though while planning the logo? A funny coincidence imo :)