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The Community Store garnered a lot of excitement when it launched, and a big part of its success can be attributed to the collection of great designs that were already on display in the gallery.  I owe a debt of gratitude to the following designers who shared their work with us and helped make this possible:

Make sure to also check out the more recent submissions, and if you like the illustration style of a particular artist simply click on their name to view their portfolio of submitted designs.  You can also do this through the artists page.

A few nights ago I stumbled on a cool site called Teenormous, the ultimate t-shirt search engine.  Of course the first thing I did was search for “Mozilla Firefox”, but unfortunately got nothing.  So I contacted the Teenormous crew and asked if they can include our shirts in their database.  Brian Pipa and Tom Davies, the brains behind Teenormous, immediately helped us out by indexing the entire Mozilla Store — Thanks guys!  You can even filter the results by color, gender, and price.  The process is automated so as our inventory is refreshed, so are your search results. Did I mention that they used an open-source search/indexing engine? An added bonus.

Update: and now all designs from the Community Store are indexed and can also be found on Teenormous!

Note: I just announced the launch of the Mozilla Community Store on the Mozilla News Blog – crossposted below. Special thanks to the amazing team that helped make this all happen: John Slater, Ryan Doherty, Alex Buchanan, Mike Morgan, Aravind Gottipati, Stephen Donner, Melissa Shapiro, Catherine Brady, Harvey Anderson, Mark Surman, and of course – our partners over at Zazzle.

This morning we announced the launch of the Mozilla Community Store, a new open source approach to our t-shirt creation process that allows anyone to submit their original designs and make them publicly available for purchase.

The Store gallery is comprised entirely of community-generated art from around the world, all of which can be fully customized through Zazzle — a leading on-demand retail platform offering customization tools to help you create products fitted to your unique personal style. The process is pretty straightforward and there are lots of options to choose from, including:

• Over 400 apparel products including basic t-shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks.
• Styles covering women, men, kids, and baby.
• Detailed size charts that range from XS – 6XL.
• A wide variety of shirt colors.
• Scaling and repositioning of the design on the shirt.
• Adding custom text and other images.
• And more!

The Mozilla Community Store was inspired by the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest, which resulted in a large pool of really impressive designs and a demand to make more of them available for print. We’ve seeded the Store with 60 of the best submissions from the contest, and are excited to see the collection grow.

You can contribute designs at any time through the upload tool on the site. Send us high resolution PNGs or JPGs of your best work, and make sure to enter your name so that we can give you full credit. We encourage you to be creative, but design concepts should generally be based on: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird or Lightning. Please read the Guidelines and FAQ for all the details.

In support of the launch, Zazzle is offering 20% off purchases through December 25th. Enter the special promo code MOZILLAMERCH at checkout for the discount…happy shopping!

The Mozilla Community Store is gearing up for launch and should be ready in the coming week(s).  This will be one giant step towards unleashing the creative energy of the community by empowering you to create your own, one-of a kind apparel.  Exciting stuff! But let me shed some more light on what this means and how its going to work.

When you visit the Community Store you can browse the gallery to shop from an array of community generated designs. We’ve seeded the Store with over 50 designs from the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest, but you can also start from scratch and add your own. There will be plenty of guidelines and other useful information to help you in the process. Send us high resolution jpgs or pngs of your best artwork using the upload tool on the site, and make sure to enter your name in the form so that we can give you full credit. You have the option of creating and buying products with your design immediately after it’s uploaded.  And once its placed in the public Store gallery, it’ll be available for anyone to customize and purchase.

Every design can be customized on over 400 apparel products through Zazzle.  Styles include basic t-shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks for women, men, kids, and even baby! Once you’ve selected the style, you can change the color and pick a size ranging from XS – 6XL depending on the selection. You can also scale and re-position the design on the shirt, add customized text, images, and much more. You can basically twist and tweak the final product till your heart’s content.  I’ve got a few snapshots of the customization tools here, and here.

I hope this helps give you a better understanding of the Community Store and what it will offer.  Both John and I will continue to post updates and share details as we go along.  If you’ve got some cool ideas brewing, its not too early to start designing.  You can contribute to the Store from the moment it goes live.

Back in February we decided to try something new and “open sourced” our design process to create the official Firefox 3 t-shirt.  In addition to getting a great winning shirt, the result was a large pool of really impressive designs and a growing demand to make more of them available for print.  So, for the last several months we’ve been hurdling various legal and logistical challenges to make this happen.  I’m now happy to announce that we’ve partnered with Zazzle.com to create the “Mozilla Community Store” – a sidekick to the original Mozilla Store which will serve as a new and open channel for community generated products.

Before making a final decision on our Community Store partner, we explored a variety of options to ensure things like product quality, flexibility, and geographic reach.  We even used the Firefox logo and other sample designs to test color calibration across different t-shirts styles.  In the end, we felt that Zazzle offered the best combination of features, including full fledged customization tools that really put you in control.  And that’s exactly what we wanted, to unlock the community’s creative energy and empower people to create their own stuff.

The Community Store isn’t quite finished yet, but I hope to have it ready in the next month or so. Make sure to start thinking of your designs! Once it launches we’ll have plenty of details to help guide you through the entire process. Stay tuned!

A belated note about the Firefox 3 CD which is now available in the Store.  We worked with the talented guys at Royal Order, the same agency that designed Mozilla.com, to create a CD label and cover in the same illustration style as the website. We also made some upgrades to the previous CDs by highlighting the top new features on the inside sleeve, along with detailed installation instructions. The latter I could not have done without the help of Stephen Donner, John O’Duinn, and Lukas Blakk – so thanks guys for your meticulous eyes! I think the CD looks pretty awesome, and perhaps go so far to say its the best Firefox CD yet!

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!