

Happy Cogs Redesign Mozilla - daleharvey
http://redesignmozilla.org/

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zaidf
Wow. I'm pretty underwhelmed by these designs.

IMO all the concepts are giving too much emphasis on big slick graphics and
too little on content. I was still left asking "what's your point?" and "am I
on a band's website?"

I like that in the current design the focus is on the products. I wish they'd
maintain that and use the emphasis on products as the starting point for the
redesign.

More people care about Mozilla's products than the _idea_ of open-source.

~~~
ja2ke
There's a difference between Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com. These designs are
for Mozilla.org, home of information about what Mozilla as an organization and
the Mozilla foundation are about (as well as for developer resources, which I
imagine would be a little less heavy handed than the landing page, regardless
of what style is chosen) -- _not_ for Mozilla.com, the product-focused site
intended to handle download requests and information about Firefox and
Thunderbird.

I think that, while these designs might be a little art heavy for some, they
are on the right track, as when you're talking about Mozilla as a public
organization and an umbrella of properties, it makes sense to have the sites
talking about their broader goals and trying to educate people about the ideas
behind the group. Mozilla.com can "sell you" on Firefox and Thunderbird.
Mozilla.org can do the same for the principles and resources behind the
products.

~~~
neilk
I get that they want to talk more about their principles, but ever heard of
"show, don't tell"? If Mozilla really is a vibrant community, then the front
page should demonstrate this by being useful to that community. Links to all
the things that Mozilla developers do, or mailing lists, or whatever else.

People know when they are being sold. These web page designs are trying to
sell. The "product" is that Mozilla is better because of its principles and
because there's a community. I admire Mozilla a lot, but... newsflash: NOBODY
CARES. Users don't care. Developers sort of care but they know about Mozilla
already. If they are looking for donors, perhaps some deluded people think
"community" is automatically great, but I'd think it would be more effective
to talk about success stories and how provably influential Mozilla is. Once
the potential donor is fished in, then talk about why this happens at Mozilla
and not at Microsoft.

Even as a marketing website these designs are not very fresh nor do they get
to the heart of what makes open source different. It's like someone said
"global community" and the designer thought "global... global... how about a
globe?" and "community... community... I know, constructivist graphics
reminiscent of 1920s communism!" These designs are clueless about what a real
software community is like.

I did like the watercolor backgrounds, though.

~~~
ja2ke
"Show don't tell" is an extremely valid point. I guess I was pleased enough to
see that it was so apparent that they told their designers what they were
excited about and that it was not the sort of thing that a professionally
designed marketing-style website tries to ever communicate, that I was blinded
to the fact that I was being punched in the face by a lot of telling and not a
lot of showing.

------
jasonkester
Wow. This really brings back the Blake Ross interview from Founders at Work,
where he was talking about how the Mozilla developers and designers just plain
didn't understand Real People. His descriptions of the crazy design ideas
those guys were coming up with read like they were critiquing the designs in
this article. It's actually spooky.

The funny thing is, this was the reason that FireFox forked from Mozilla in
the first place, and the reason why it became popular with regular people. Now
it's back as the main branch of Mozilla, and it looks like the Crazy Communist
Dinosaur team is back at the helm.

It's fascinating to watch.

~~~
c3o
I disagree that this is the same thing.

At the release of Mozilla 1.0, the website looked like this:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org/)
\-- clearly targeted towards developers, with product download links hidden in
a nondescript column. I suppose that's what Ross was talking about: The site
didn't offer any convincing arguments as to why you'd want to download their
browser, and didn't make it easy to do so.

Nowadays, the download site has moved to mozilla.com which is very much
targeted at "Real People", and .org is about evangelism and developer info, at
least the first of which these designs reflect quite well. If they go
overboard it's on the marketing speak and boldness, but certainly not on
technical details and programmer jargon like the old mozilla.org did.

That said, the .com vs .org distinction is probably confusing: They should
just move Firefox to firefox.com and drop the Mozilla brand from it
altogether.

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daleharvey
I think these designs fail pretty badly, for the first part, I think I can see
around 1/2 elements on each design with my browser opened at slightly than
larger size. which is more than enough for every other website I use.

I dont care for the open source propoganda, as far as I can tell from these
designs is mozilla want to engage the community a bit more, but nothing pulls
me in. I would guess I am in the target market for this and I am not in anyway
more inclined to become part of mozillas community

and only 1 of the 3 even have a somewhat decent introduction to the suite!

~~~
moe
Same impression here.

The huge header graphics are a joke, I'm at a 1920x1600 screen but still get
the vertical scrollbar at my normal browser-size.

I also find all offered layouts annoyingly cluttered and uncomfortable to
read. The artsy colors and low contrast may work for a webdesign studio
portfolio - but I'll prefer the current mozilla.org over each of them any day.

~~~
beaucollins
Since when were vertical scrollbars bad?

~~~
moe
They are not inherently bad. It's just a bad idea to have a header graphic
take up half of the screen, pushing most of the content below the fold...

~~~
wmeredith
Oh, lord. Go do layout for a newspaper. There IS NO FOLD...
<http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of>

~~~
moe
Yes, there is. The fold is exactly where my browser viewport ends.

Worse yet, google says that most people don't look beyond the _third_ result.
So the mental fold is even higher than that.

------
mronge
I don't like any of them actually. The most important part of the site,
Mozilla's products, are listed below the fold.

~~~
daleharvey
I mentioned the same point but it isnt really the most important part of the
site, obviously a number of people will be looking for firefox etc so it
should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com

but this is mozilla.org, its about the community and the developers, .com is
about the products

~~~
zaidf
>it should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com

Theoretically, yeah. But see, a lot of people know mozilla is a non-profit.
And thus, must automatically type mozilla.org instead of .com. IMO the two
should show the same site.

Of course they must have more solid data and hopefully they are using it to
make their decisions.

~~~
ja2ke
Try an I'm Feeling Lucky for "Firefox." "A lot of people know Mozilla is non-
profit," sure, but more people know that there is a browser called "Firefox"
and don't give two craps about Mozilla or non-profit or open source or
anything else. Surely there will be some fringe cases, but I bet most people
who still go to "mozilla.org" for Firefox requests are die-hard old FF/Moz
fans from before the .com site appeared, or developers. Most people will, I'd
bet, just google Firefox or type in "firefox.com" and be correct.

------
joshu
s/Mozilla/Mozilla's website/

Not as advertised.

------
neilk
That line "a postmodern style that would make artists like Robert Rauschenberg
proud" makes me shudder.

It gives me the sense that, like many designers, they are in frustrated-artist
mode. They don't care so much about what Mozilla needs as their personal
desire to make super-sized gorgeous graphics that wow their colleagues.

Believe me, I understand the motivation... but I don't think these designs are
going to help Mozilla.

~~~
asjo
I was very uplifted by the Rauschenberg name-dropping. Until I saw the design.

;-)

Naw, they will hopefully get better in the next couple of iterations.

------
jherdman
I'm a little baffled by the 3rd redesign and FutureRuby's
(<http://futureruby.com/>) choice of using a Soviet Russia inspired design. I
get that they have a futuristic edge to them, and that this is considered
cool. But the connotations these designs can imply may make it really
difficult to get approval/funding/adoption by gray hairs.

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blasdel
Do they not understand the irony of making website mockups for a _browser
vendor_ solely as giant images in Photoshop?

~~~
ja2ke
If they actually implemented them they wouldn't be mockups. If they hacked
together some shim to get the text represented as in-browser text instead of
baked into the image, people would waste time shitting on their code. Some
people prototype extremely quickly in Photoshop, some people prototype
extremely quickly in a text editor. No need to hate. :( I imagine, also, that
if there really is any irony there, they do understand it.

------
cookiecaper
The first design is easily the best, but none are very good. They need to tone
down the approach significantly -- all of them are too cluttered to really
extract the information people will care about. They need to do something bold
and h2-like to explain quickly (one sentence, ideally) what Mozilla is, and
then say "Here are our products:" with big, paragraph-level links, icons, and
descriptions to Mozilla's flagships, with miscellaneous/other information at
the bottom with modest 200x200 pixel icons and three-four items per line, or
something like that. They're going way, way overboard -- this can and should
be almost all text that follows the reader's flow and puts all the pertinent
information right there. Ads for opensource can be placed below the fold or on
a separate page. I'm tempted to do a mockup; Mozilla, feel free to send me
money if you want one. ;)

