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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.