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Back from beautiful Whistler, where we held the 2010 Mozilla Summit – an exciting action-packed week of amazing demos, sessions, and more.  The Summit is the largest gathering of leadership across the project, of key contributors and passionate Mozillians from all corners of the globe.  It’s a rare occasion to have everyone in one place, a biennial reunion of massive proportions to celebrate our collective achievements and plan ahead for the future.  It’s truly an inspiring event, and I’ve been so fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in two of them.  This year was by far the largest, with over 600 attendees and 60 countries represented.  To help set the right tone, I worked on creating the official Summit poster and visual identity:

The first step in the design process was defining a mood board and creative brief to capture the desired look and feel.  Then, we needed to find the right illustrator to bring it all together.  As we browsed various sites for inspiration (like Society6), we came across the work of Peskimo, a design team based in the UK that had a unique illustration style and a portfolio that matched what we were looking for.  Over the few short weeks that followed, we worked on establishing the right design concept and iterated fast towards our deadline.  The final artwork turned out absolutely awesome, and served as the core design theme that shaped the entire experience design of the Summit.  Huge thanks to David and Jodie of Peskimo, the talented illustrators behind this original artwork.

A few words on the concept and art direction:

For the illustration style, we wanted to produce something different than past Mozilla artwork – stepping away from the retro-futuristic/sci-fi types of imagery that we tend to rely on, to create something appropriately bold, yet more organic.  With that in mind, we took inspiration from the natural setting of Whistler to create a serene and green landscape.  We established a softer/earthy palette as the foundation, with warmer/more vibrant accent colors to echo our brand and instill a sense of energy into the scene.  A lot of thought went into the details of this poster, from the individual character designs to the arrangement of, and meaning behind, various elements.  Although not terribly obvious, the green bolted path sweeping across the canvas is an abstract representation of the wild spirit of the web, harnessed and guided forward by the community as they march towards the future.

Designing the parade of characters was among the biggest challenges.  How do you capture the notion of a global community in a way that people can relate to… without getting lost in the pixels or leaving something out?  To do this, we focused on communicating the broader concept of diversity in a fun way, by creating a sea of whimsical characters (monsters, critters, etc) of different shapes, colors, and sizes to echo our own diverse community.  Everything from the color of their eyes and freckled cheeks, to the various accessories they’re wearing was tweaked and iterated on until it felt right.  The result was a cast of unique and lovable characters:

The attention to detail extends all the way to the back of the scene.  Let your eyes wander deep into this parade, and you might even catch a few hidden easter eggs:  The Firefox Robot and The Red Dino, woven in as a little nod to our past.  Can you find them?  If not, peek here.

A few words on the experience design:

Once the poster was finalized, we handed off the assets to Black & White, an agency we enlisted to manage the design experience of the Summit.  With individual elements carefully extracted, the artwork was extended across a variety of goods to brand every aspect of the event.  From standard badges, to an array of colorful t-shirts, to decorative cut-outs guiding your way around the hotel, to giant prints draping the keynote hall, and much more… we held nothing back.  The final surprise was unveiled on the last night when we were greeted by three featured characters at the top of Blackcomb mountain where we danced the night away.  Special thanks to the brave souls who stepped into those costumes and brought them to life.  What a memorable evening, and what an amazing Summit!  Hope everyone enjoyed these little critters as much as I did.

So, where do these Mozillian characters go from here?  A lot of people have expressed interest in having the source files made available to the community so that they can remix and use them for various other projects.  Although I’m thrilled to hear that the illustrations were a big hit, we unfortunately won’t be able to release them into the wild.  The poster was created as a special artwork specific to this year’s Summit only.  Even materials like the t-shirts that you received were limited edition prints for the Summit and will not be available anywhere else.  Consider them rare memorabilia encapsulating your 2010 Summit experience.  We do however have desktop backgrounds, here. Enjoy!

As part of our larger plans to strengthen the communication channels with our community, we’ve created the Firefox Engagement Hub on mozilla.com, highlighting our top 4 social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr.  This is a fairly simple/static page right now (a beta if you will) which we’ll be evolving into a more robust engagement space in the near future – including an awesome Twitter visualization, and much more.  This is an exciting step towards providing a better window into our social media presence, and surfacing ways to stay connected with all that’s going on in the world of Firefox.

With respect to the design direction:  Yes, those butterflies are swimming underwater!  The background illustration (created by the Delicious Design League) is a metaphoric representation of Firefox and concepts of community and collaboration.  Coral reefs are beautifully diverse and complex habitats, teaming with colonies of fish and an array of other organisms who all rely on each other to thrive.  The coral reef itself is not only alive, but also serves to protect and support the larger ecosystem.  The social butterflies, each with a unique design painted on their wings, further echo the notion of diversity and personalization.  Thanks to Monique Johnson, we also created a custom icon set by re-illustrating the individual logos for a more hand-made feel that matched the rest of the site’s design style.

* Crossposted from the Mozilla Blog.  Special thanks to Ryan Snyder from webdev, Krupa from QA, Chelsea Novak from the Foundation, Liz Compton from Legal, and John Slater from Marketing for all their help in getting this challenge up and running. *

I’m excited to announce the latest challenge from the Creative Collective: designing the Mozilla 2010 t-shirt! The goal is to create a cool design that captures the unique essence of Mozilla, which would then be printed as the official Mozilla 2010 t-shirt and distributed as an exclusive item to contributors.

Creating a design that represents the multi-faceted nature of Mozilla, its mission and its values is certainly no easy task, but we know that our amazing design community is up to the challenge. You might recall the last time that we gave our t-shirt design process an open-source flavor like this was with the Firefox 3 t-shirt contest, which resulted in thousands of submissions from around the world. Now, for the first time, we’re channeling the talents of our design community towards Mozilla (vs. Firefox), which makes this challenge particularly interesting and even more exciting.

When designing, take inspiration from the broader themes that make Mozilla unique, such as: openness, community, and innovation. You can retain the bold, constructivist graphic style of the original artwork, or take a completely different direction. The possibilities are practically endless and we encourage you to take a more abstract approach, but please keep the Dino logo intact as indicated by our Trademark Policy. For additional details, considerations and requirements make sure to visit the design challenge page.

And, remember that the submission period ends on April 30th 2010. So, get those creative juices flowing and send us your best stuff!

Twitter is an important source of information for millions of people, and it has also become one of the top communication channels that we use at Mozilla to engage with our community.  The Firefox Twitter account is growing faster than ever before, and a search on the #firefox hashtag alone will summon a lively stream of tweets from around the globe.  But that’s only a thin slice of all the action taking place.  To really appreciate the scale and scope of Firefox activity within the Twitter universe, you need to analyze the data through an entirely different lens.

To achieve this, I’m working on creating a Twitter visualization that captures the unique and multi-dimentional nature of our community, their conversations, and the energy that flows through their tweets.  As you know, there are some incredibly complex and mesmerizing data visualizations out there… my goal is to create a similarly stunning Twitter visualization that is also built on open web technology.  As Morgamic kindly put it, we’d like to make this a “crazy utilization of the open web”.

I’m personally really excited about this project… we’re always looking for new tools to engage with our users and to celebrate our community, and I think a cool visualization of our Twitter activity will help encourage that.  But to take this to the next level and kick-start the ideation process, I need your help.

How would you like to see our Twitter community visualized?  What kinds of information or data types would you want to capture?  To help guide your thinking and provide some inspiration, I’ve collected a set of the most creative Twitter visualizations from around the web.  I also distilled these down to what I thought were key elements that made for a great visualization, and therefore required specs for what our visualization should be:

* Approachable: Captures meaningful data that’s relatively easy to digest by just about anyone.
* Beautiful: Presents the information through an artistic lens, and is generous in its use of color.
* Dynamic: Displays activity in real-time, conveying a constant state of movement through animated elements.
* Interactive: Allows users to play with design elements, and filter/search through the data with relevant tags.
* Unique: Takes inspiration from, but does not closely mimic, what has already been created.

With all that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas around a potential design concept for our Twitter visualization.  Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.  I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

One of the most rewarding aspects of Mozilla is, of course, the amazing community that we’re all a part of.  A community with such passion and creative energy that often surfaces in ways that leave us pleasantly surprised.

A short while ago I met William Blanc Dit Jolicoeur, from Paris, after having stumbled upon his Firefox Song.  That’s right, a song about Firefox!  And a particularly good one, too.  A soothing bossa nova melody strummed on the guitar, with lyrics that spoke of classic Firefox features… composed over two years ago and posted more recently on our Facebook fan page.  I was thrilled to see this… intrigued, and curious to learn more.

As it turns out, William is a long time Firefox user and fan (going as far back as the days of Firebird, circa 2003). Web developer by day… singer, song-writer, and ukulele player by night. Indeed, he is the same enthusiastic ukulele player featured on our Fastest Firefox compilation video. And I wanted to (belatedly) shine the spotlight on him, and share his video, uncut, for all to enjoy.

William, who also goes by the nickname Azurams (inspired by the French comic series Asterix the Gaul), has been playing for many years now and hopes to perform in local bars around Paris later this year. He is also an active member of the French ukulele community, which is pretty darn awesome.  If you’re lucky, you might catch him adding a live soundtrack to your train ride (TGV) from Paris to Lyon… or spreading good cheer at a picnic jam session in the park. And if you happen to be attending MozCamp EU this weekend in Prague, make sure to say hello! William and his trusty ukulele will both be there.

Thanks again William for lending your musical talents to us. Hope to see more great things from you, soon!

(Make sure to also check out his Youtube Channel for more.)