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One of our priorities for the Mozilla Store is to keep the selection fresh and interesting.  With that said, we’re currently working on re-merchandising and adding cool new products to the Store.  To make sure our community has a voice in the selection process, we’ve created a quick poll of suggested items for you to choose from, just like we did last fall.  Please take a moment and vote for your favorite item:

• Firefox-themed laptop skin
• Mozilla community Rubik’s cube
• Competition-grade frisbee with Firefox logo
• Robot-themed 1Gb USB key

The item with the most votes will be included in our re-fresh and made available in the Store as soon as possible.  If you have suggestions other than what you see listed, feel free to share them with us by leaving a comment. Of course, the Firefox 3 T-shirt (shown below) has already been a popular new item in the Store. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and updating our inventory with fun new products. Thanks again for your help!

Earlier this year we opened our design process with a contest to create the official Firefox 3 T-shirt - a challenge that was quickly met with global enthusiasm! We received over 2000 submissions representing countless hours of hard work and creative contributions from a passionate design community, ranging from complete beginners to experienced professionals. The Flickr contest group grew to over 3,500 members and was bustling with activity, collaboration and intense discussion.  Over time it evolved into an impressive pool of talent and artistic expression, all in support of Firefox!  I really wanted to capture this creative energy and help demonstrate the diversity in styles, so I made an image collage stitching together a large sampled set of these great designs.

Our team here at Mozilla tackled the difficult task of selecting the top five, which were then passed on to you, the community, for a final decision. Garnering the overwhelming majority of the votes was the “lineup” design by Tracie Andrews (a.k.a “egirluk”), a talented illustrator and graphic designer from the UK. Tracie was among the contest’s most prolific designers and we’re very excited to have her work featured in the Mozilla Store.  To learn more about Tracie and her creative process, check out her portfolio and John Slater’s post on The Story Behind The Shirt.

Although open to interpretation, the winning design, with iconic symbols of people and a fox, lends itself perfectly to the concept of community - an important part of what Firefox is all about.  It also became a fun source of inspiration for our promotional photo shoot, which involved mimicking the design with our own team and the illustrious Fox himself.  Check out some of our pictures below, as well as this secret footage that was recently discovered.  Special thanks to our amazing in-house photographer Rolo who helped make it happen while battling against unideal conditions, including swift winds and my uncontrollable hair.

This design contest was the first major project that I managed at Mozilla from concept to completion.  I thoroughly enjoyed every step and found it to be a great introduction to our unique community.  Thanks again to everyone for their dedicated support and help in making this effort a success.  Especially those who actively participated in the group and contributed with their designs.

It has definitely been a long and interesting journey leading us to the official, community-based Firefox 3 t-shirt which is now available in the Mozilla Store!

I recently designed a banner and some supplemental graphic art to help promote the Firefox Screencast Contest which launched on May 19th. If you haven’t already heard, the contest is a great opportunity to apply your creative talents towards the SUMO knowledge base by creating videos for the top 100 support articles. This community-powered project already has an extensive library of tutorials and troubleshooting information, a valuable educational tool written by thousands of volunteers in the Mozilla community. But technical concepts can be hard to explain in words and static images alone. Therefore the Screencast Contest aims to visually translate the most popular of these articles through a more powerful and effective medium: Video!

When Seth approached me with this project, he provided a brief background of the contest and a few visual references - leaving much of the creative direction in my hands. I knew through experience that producing a screencast is relatively simple, but also that the process reflects upon the classic art of filmmaking - the ability to visualize and communicate a series of events into a story. This thought conjured up images of vintage film reels, animation frames and motion picture cameras - familiar references to the concept of video which were then used as inspirational art for my designs.

We have a talented pool of freelance designers that work with us on most of our projects, but on occasion I also help respond to various design needs. Visual expression and graphic design are among my many passions, so I really enjoy these design challenges. Its part of what makes my job here so great!

These images were used as promo spots on the main contest website, the prizes page, and the Facebook group. I also wanted to thank Chris Bewick, designer of the exclusive Firefox t-shirt prize used for this contest.

The excitement is growing as we near the release of Firefox 3. To recognize this monumental event, we’re on a mission to set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours! As the official authority on record-breaking achievements, Guinness has a long standing reputation for its collection of the extreme. Firefox 3 will be no exception as its the strongest version the Mozilla team has ever developed. Show your support for Firefox and be a part of history on Download Day. The clock will start ticking the moment Firefox 3 becomes available.

To promote this campaign, I designed a new digital gift for our collection on Facebook. A “Download Day Badge” illustrated in a style consistent with the website design and branding. As with other gifts, one of the main challenges involved optimizing the image and copy to fit within the allotted space - a very small canvas size of 64×64 pixels. The “Download Day Badge” can be personalized with a message and comes equipped with a link to the Download Day website for more information. The Badge was placed in the top 20 gifts within the first hour of its release, with over 160 sent! Help us continue this momentum and spread the word through your social networks by sending this gift to all your friends. Thanks again to Zach Allia, who helped make this happen on his widely popular application, Free Gifts.

The Mozilla Firefox gift collection is here! Digital gifts that is… Thanks to Zach Allia, the founder and developer of the Free Gifts application, you can now share the ‘gift’ of Firefox with all your friends on Facebook and help spread the word virally through your social networks. Our primary goal is to allow fun interaction with these icons, and gain exposure to a new audience. Each gift can be personalized with a message and also includes a link to our website as an opportunity to learn more about Firefox.

Free Gifts was an instant hit when it was first launched in early June of 2007 as a challenge to Facebook’s original application, “because digital gifts should be free”. Zach’s focus on the community and user experience has consistently elevated his application above the noise and into the top 10. Its also among the rare few that don’t engage in spamming behavior or aggressive recruitment. Since its inception it has experienced phenomenal growth and user adoption: garnering 8 million loyal users with 70 million total gifts sent - an average gifting rate of 150,000 to 200,000 per day!*.

We’re really excited to be a part of this energy with the introduction of our very own digital gifts. The first set includes some of the well known faces of Mozilla (the Red Dino, Bugzilla, Foxkeh, Firefox 3 Robot), and other fun Firefox inspired items which I illustrated myself (including a beach ball, hot air balloon, birthday cake and t-shirt). We’ll be refreshing the collection with new images on a regular basis, so we’d love to hear your suggestions for future gift ideas. In the meantime, make sure to check out the collection here, and start gifting!

* Free Gifts application stats are approximations obtained from Zach Allia and reflect the latest data as of last week.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for some time now. Having my thoughts and random musings permanently exposed to the masses is somewhat counterintuitive to my more private nature, but the potential to inspire or simply connect with a passing reader in distant corners of the world seems amazing to me. Like planting digital seeds and watching them grow through open communication and collaboration across the web.

Since joining Mozilla in January, I’ve been working on a variety of projects with a particular focus on product marketing and art direction. I will be sharing more information about these projects and our creative process, while encouraging participation whenever possible. We have a great team here with big aspirations and a growing level of excitement surrounding the upcoming release of Firefox 3. Through this blog I hope to provide a window into our marketing efforts here, and also some of my thoughts elsewhere.