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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.

Today we reached an exciting milestone:  surpassing 1 million fans on our Facebook fan page!

It was about one year ago that we began dedicating resources towards optimizing our page, and building a better engagement channel with our community on Facebook.  We’ve come a long way since then… increasing our fan base by over 639,400 (~177%), and experiencing daily growth rates of 5,000-6,000 (and as high as 34,600+) since Jan of 2010.

These are huge achievements, and all due to various important factors – most notably the redesigned First Run/What’s New pages which highlight our Firefox fan page and were pushed with the recent 3.6 major update.  The click-traffic generated by these pages, combined with the organic/viral distribution of content on Facebook has led to an accelerated growth rate, and unprecedented spikes, which can be seen on the graphs below.  But these numbers alone don’t define our success, and in the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about our social media strategy with Facebook…  diving deeper to talk about how we got here, our learnings so far, and plans moving forward.  For now though, I simply wanted to share this bit of exciting news with everyone, and to say congratulations [enter massive applause]. Here’s to another million!

Last week John Slater held a brown bag to begin discussions around reorganizing the Mozilla web universe. As part of this proposed plan, mozilla.org would become the central hub connecting all other sites… meaning that mozilla.org will play a much bigger role in telling the story of Mozilla, who we are, and why we’re here as an organization. To do this, we’re working with the Foundation, and the community, to refine mozilla.org’s homepage with a light redesign — making sure that the appropriate content is captured and presented in the best possible way.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the following:

* What is the key content? There are so many elements to the Mozilla story that we can’t highlight them all equally on the homepage. What do you consider to be the key content, or categories of information, that should be highlighted?
* What are the calls to action? When people visit mozilla.org, what’s the main thing we want them to see or do? Learn more about Mozilla? Read about our projects? Donate? Get involved?
* What does mozilla.org mean to you? And how would you articulate it?  It’s an evocative question that will probably be interpreted in a slightly different way by each person.

Thanks in advance for your input, it will be a big help as we start this project.

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!

Back from a blogger’s hibernation, and warming up my fingers with a quick post before the weekend kicks in.

It was a busy and exciting week around here with the launch of Firefox 3.6. But as everyone was celebrating this latest release, I was also secretly celebrating another little occasion — my 2-year anniversary at Mozilla. Two years ago, today, I officially entered the amazing world of Mozilla. Three product launches, hundreds of challenges, and thousands of smiles later… I feel ever so fortunate to be a part of this movement, and the amazing community that fuels it. I’m honored to share the company of such incredibly talented people every day, and to be working alongside marketers who I’d say are more appropriately described as superheros. And I’m proud, to be a part of the Creative team, where I can help to dream up big ideas and turn them into reality. As I reflect on the past two years… I can’t help but marvel at all that we’ve accomplished, and wonder where this journey will lead us next…

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.)

*Crossposted from the Mozilla Blog.*

I’m excited to announce the initial beta release of the Mozilla Creative Collective, the official new home and hub of activity for our visual design community. The goal of the Creative Collective is to use art as a means for spreading Firefox and sharing the Mozilla story in new ways.

Building communities is a big part of what Mozilla is all about, and key to our success as an organization. We have dedicated communities that contribute to nearly every aspect of Mozilla – from software development, to extensions, to localization, to marketing, and more – but an area that’s traditionally lacked an organized community is visual design. And because art is such a powerful form of communication, we’re harnessing that with the Creative Collective.

Mozilla actually has a long history with community design. Successful past projects such as the Firefox 3 t-shirt, Mozilla Mexico logo design contest and Personas are just a sampling of our community’s creative energy – and demonstrate the growing level of interest among people who are eager to contribute.

On the Creative Collective site, artists can create personal profiles, share their work in a public gallery, connect and collaborate with others from around the world, and much more. There’s also a variety of social features, such as a system of achievement badges, to make the experience more fun for everyone.

An important feature that’s not yet available (but will be added soon) is the Design Challenge, which will prompt members to submit design solutions based around a particular theme. Although the feature hasn’t been formally introduced to the site, we’re already reaching out to artists to help support Mozilla Service Week with creative designs that inspire action. If you’re looking for an initial way to get involved, be sure to check that out.

As noted earlier, the site is still in beta so we’re eager to hear your feedback. If you have suggestions on how to improve the site, please don’t hesitate to share them with us. We’ll be making tweaks and adding new features over time, and are counting on the community to help guide the project’s future direction. So, make sure to check back often, or follow our tweets, for updates. Looking forward to seeing you on the Creative Collective!

* Huge thanks to the amazing team that made this all possible: John Slater, Jeff Zeller, Mike Morgan, Ryan Snyder, Craig Cook, Ryan Doherty, Greg Storey, Ethan Marcotte, Stephen Caver, Helenita Johnson, Stephanie Schonauer, Studio Number One, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, Raymond Etornam, Shyam Mani, Catherine Brady and Paul Kim.  And everyone else who contributed their feedback during the design process. *

We recently released 20 new digital gifts into the Facebook ecosystem.  These cute little icons are part of the  Mozilla Firefox collection that launched last year through the Free Gifts application – conceived by Zach Allia and later transitioned over to SGN.  Exchanging digital gifts has long been a popular activity on social networks, and thousands of Firefox gifts have been sent so far.  If you’re interested, the total numbers per icon are reported on a basic stats page, here (Foxkeh is #1, with over 8,000 gifts sent).  Thanks to Shervin Pishevar, Chris Henley, and Gabriel Stock from SGN for their help on this.  Happy gifting!

Firefox 3.5 is finally here! And what better way to celebrate the launch than with the brand new 3.5 t-shirt. We had a lot of fun last year with an open call for designs that led us to the official Firefox 3 shirt.  But this time around, we tried something different.  Inspired by the concept of a tag cloud, we turned to the community for help in coming up with a collection of words that best described Firefox.  We then used these words to create a stylized typographic visualization of what Firefox 3.5 is all about – highlighting some of the key features and goodness that’s baked into the browser.

The final design is not only awesome (and among my favorites), but also a unique addition to our t-shirt archive, which continues to grow as it captures snapshots in Mozilla’s history.  Special thanks to Monique Johnson, for lending her artistic talents to us once again and creating this beautiful word cloud.

The new Firefox 3.5 t-shirts are now available in the Mozilla Stores, professionally modeled and photographed by members of our very own team.  You can also download this design in different sizes as a desktop wallpaper.  Enjoy!

** Paris, Toronto, MV, Tokyo and China offices…looking good!  Silverorange has joined the fun, too.