While I don't like the branding move at all, I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous. Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast? No, because people aren't complete idiots. Those that are going to know/care about Mozilla will be able to tell it's a little web reference nestled inside the logo and that it still reads "Mozilla".
BTW, for context, I think that conversation took place in Singapore. "Challenger" is the name of a chain of computer megastores here. "Simi" is local slang for "What's up."
Change languages and you're in a whole other world.
Have an Argentine (for example) pronounce Yosemite National Park for you.
Or for that matter, ask an English speaker to pronounce Habanero (there's no ñ) or someone from the East Coast to say Oregon or Puyallup.
While those are words and names, examples abound in marketing.
But to continue my example, Argentines already pronounce Mozilla differently than an English speaker, or other Spanish speakers for that matter! So this should be nothing new.
As an Argentina (born and living in AR), I can assure you we pronounce Mozilla almost identically. The Z might sound softer (like it does in "song"), but that's it.
The people from the above examples are just holding laptops upside down, there's no language involved there.
The difference is that Verizon-Checkmark is clearly an invalid interpretation - the checkmark is obviously decorative.
Mozilla's new logo was chosen specifically due to the double meaning, the similarity between the symbols :// and the glyphs "ill".
The ambiguity is what makes it "clever", and it's kind of an in-joke that most non-tech people, who've never heard of "Mozilla" as such, won't immediately register. They'll read the characters literally and say "moz://a? Is that a new computer thing?"
I don't think that's an idiotic response at all.
This is a bad generic logo merely because it doesn't clearly communicate their company's identity in a unique and obvious way, which is the sole function of a logo in the first place. I could see this rendering appearing at some hacker events or on t-shirts, but IMO it makes no sense to use it as a generic logo.
I don't even want to think about the nightmare of accidentally rendering the string "moz://a" in a typeface that the lawyers consider too similar to that used in the logo.
Sure, people will almost definitely not call them "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a", but I could easily see a lot of people shortening the whole thing to just Moz. The :// in a url acts as a separator, so the important bits are whatever come before and after it. All there is after it is an "a" which isn't very informative, so my eyes are drawn to "moz" instead. Which isn't ideal because a company named Moz already exists and has no connection to Mozilla whatsoever.
Maybe less technical people who aren't used to seeing full urls won't have the same reaction, but in that case you've still got a problem because they probably won't already know who Mozilla is and it's kind of a leap to go from Moz://a to Mozilla without already knowing the name.
I am definitely old school, but if this (IMHO senseless) idea of reading "://" as "ill" would go on, a few sites might be read "the wrong way", as an example ;) silly combinator:
I was unaware that it spelled out Mozilla until a news article explained it for me. Reading : as "i" is incredibly unnatural to me, and I still don't read it as Mozilla. I see it and parse it as "the company in charge of Firefox."
If asked to pronounce it, without news articles telling me to say "Mozilla", I'd be 100% uncertain of what to say.
Oftentimes when reading something with a lot of symbols in it, I just remove the symbols and pronounce it as if the name were a sentence. Quick example: writing emacs lisp, I see 'global-set-key' and think "Global set key", as if someone were reading it out. Thus the new name isn't moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a, which would be ridiculous, but 'Mozza', which is much more plausible but equally detrimental, eg the logo is still being misinterpreted.
Reading that article from Brand New someone posted further down, I found myself wondering briefly what "Dressed to K" meant... Maybe I just have "a complete lack of imagination or willingness to adapt" [0], but somehow I think it's not entirely my fault.
> I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous
Honestly, I'd be happier if someone called it "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwardslash-a" instead of calling it "moz-colon-backslash-backslash-a". I've seen so many people mix up slash (forward slash) and backslash!
Seems like you conflate idiocy with pre-existing exposure to a brand's proper spelling.
While I see the value of this sentiment, the brands you mentioned have branding efforts that so far overspend mozilla's that the comparison is barely relevant.
Also, typing www.mo://a.org in a browser presents a serious problem.
I read "mozza", then I "got" the web reference, and immediately disliked it. I don't really understand how moz://a is better than Mozilla, but I don't categorically oppose it either.
New branding is fine but the choice here is a bit more debatable than the examples you point out, where each of the brand names are spelled 100% with the alphabet. In OP, 3 characters in 7 are not letters.
Edit: Maybe Mozilla could have suggested an addition to UTF-8 and used that new stylized character "://"?
My mother still calls it Fox Fire and Newegg, "Egghead", although I think it's mostly to annoy me. It doesn't though, but I let her think it does because it's funny.
> Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast?
I think that a problem with all these examples is that, with the exception of "Johnson & Johnson" (where people do read '&' as it is commonly read, as 'and' rather than the name of the symbol), the decoration isn't, in fact, part of the name, so that people who ignore it correctly understand the name; whereas the decoration in moz://a is part of the name, and is not read as it would be in other contexts ('colon slash slash', back when people read full URLs aloud, slowly and awkwardly—remember those days?).
Who cares... Mozilla gets more and more irrelevant by the day. Since its clear the leadership is completely ineffective but someone manages to not be replaced, its pretty obvious Mozilla will continue its downward path.
Quote, to maybe nib the ritual hatred in the bud before mozilla becomes the new Apple:
"A logo that not only DOESN’T suck but one that has a strong idea, a fresh execution, a promising flexibility, and, that all of it together, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, manages to communicate what Mozilla is about."
Now if only someone would write an article explaining why considerations such as branding are useful even for non-profits...
edit: the last sentence was apparently interpreted as an actual question, when it was meant as a plea for someone to do an eloquent write-up of the non-profits-also-need-marketing case that I could link to.
The general idea is that 90% of people I tell "I work for Mozilla" respond with "Oh, you work on Firefox?" but we're about so much more than that. My understanding of the motives behind this change is that having better branding that explains we're focused on the internet in general will hopefully expand our reach and recognition outside the tech bubble.
I'm not sure how a logo change begins to address that. I'm INSIDE the tech bubble, and apart from Firefox and Rust I can't name a single Mozilla project that isn't canceled (Persona, phones) or on its way there (Thunderbird).
If not Firefox, then what DO you work on at Mozilla then? I'm genuinely curious.
Yeah, Rust is a Mozilla project. Graydon worked at Mozilla, and them interested in taking it as an official project.
Why do you think Mozilla is using Rust so much? (See servo, pushing rust components into FF, etc) They're not exactly known for jumping onto new things...
Sorry, I was being somewhat sarcastic (see edit). I know why it makes sense for Mozilla to do marketing, and I'm hoping for a bright future for you and your mission.
Actually, that review just underscores a problem I have with modern design, which is a focus on aesthetic elegance and cleverness over real usability concerns.
I love design, so I'm not meaning to bash design per se, but every field has its problems. With design, it's a lack of attention to usability as a scientific, empirical, psychological, cognitive, physiological sort of issue. There's too much of a focus on cleverness and theorized or actual aesthetics over real usability.
Design sits at this funny intersection of art and science, and it seems like too often the former is emphasized over the latter.
This design is a perfect example of this, and the review reinforces it. Where's the discussion of usability and confusion? When did they reach out to naive users and pose real-world use tasks involving the logo redesign? When did the review discuss this?
The logo redesign is great unless you acknowledge that it co-opts symbols that have real meaning and can be ambiguous in that regard. Mozilla was well-intended but failed.
To me, this whole discussion is a perfect example of the foibles of the design world.
> Actually, that review just underscores a problem I have with modern design, which is a focus on aesthetic elegance and cleverness over real usability concerns.
As a full-time designer who graduated from a fine arts college (read: least-user focused possible), this is completely false regarding what I and all my peers do.
Designers don't set out to be "clever" – we're not programmers, after all. We set out to solve a ritual problem of meaningfully conveying ideas and messages to a target audience, wide or narrow. The reasoning is pretty simple.
Readability (different from legibility) is an incredibly important part of designing with type, and your lede basically invalidated all else you have to say, especially as followed by "I love design."
You need money to make the things the non-profit cares about, in this case, tools to have a free and open internet. Money pays for salaries of the people employed there; servers to build, test, and distribute software; office space; etc.
They are not – the are, after all, operating in a few markets with basically the same mechanisms as any market. And the continued insistence of more or less any for-profit company (and non-profit, and government,...) shows that it's effective.
But it was a point repeatedly made in the other threads about this redesign – basically "they're wasting their/our/my money on useless stuff like this when what they need to do is make Firefox use less memory/faster/whatever...".
One of the comments there makes a good point - they should really register `moz://` as a protocol, otherwise someone will grab that at some point and cause endless confusion.
On the other hand, "we used this for branding" is really not a great justification for registering a new protocol, is it...
It may not be the best reason, but aren't there already dozens of highly product-specific schemes in use? (such as steam:, unreal:, chrome: in Firefox, chrome: in Chrome - with completely different semantics -, view-source: etc etc)
They registered it. That doesn't mean other browsers will implement it. In fact, if I were on Chrome or IE, I'd make sure "moz://a" either redirects to my own feature-page or leave it as it is (i.e. google search leading to shady SEO business moz.com).
Until now I didn't realize Mozilla changed their logo. Now I've seen it the typographer in me cries… The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information. So either Mozilla now rebrands themself as
moz-colon-slash-slash
or they now live with a significant portion of typography-anal nerds who dislike that logo.
Logos fall more in the realm of graphic design rather than typography. They're an avatar thus logos don't necessarily need to be readable - albeit there is a modern trend to use the company name in an interesting typeface as their logo. However there are plenty of examples where a company logo contains no text what-so-ever - including Mozilla's previous logo[1]. So I wouldn't get too hung up on its typographic design. At least not unless Mozilla start using 'Moz://a' in normal correspondence. ;)
Personally I quite like it. It's memorable and well suited to the business they're best known for. Which is essentially the crux of a logo.
The problem is that there's nothing unambiguously non-typographic about the design. If they had distorted the symbols so much that they were outside the realm of normal unicode characters, sure. But anyone with that font could reconstruct the logo.
Stuff like this works when the glyphs are recognizable enough, but when the design is such that you simultaneously know that it is not to be interpreted literally. It fails here because the latter isn't clear.
So in this case it is typography. That's the problem.
This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name, they serve different purposes. Consider Indesit, they style their name but have a useful logo that can stand alone.
Mozilla could do with an actual logo, something that fits with the Thunderbird & Firefox logos.
> The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information.
The purpose of text is to convey information, ambiguously or not. Text is a coherent and cohesive group of one or more sentences. A logo is not text, it is a graphic that represents an establishment or a brand. It may include some text, but it is as text as a photo of a road sign with some text on it is.
Well maybe those self-proclaimed typography nerds could take this moment to collectively wonder how all these thousands of companies using fonts other than Helvetica could have fallen for amateurs telling them that fonts could convey emotions, that ambiguity could be artful, that art could have value, or that branding could shape perception.
I mean that one guy named his company "Virgin". How ambiguous is that? He'll have a learn a lot of things. And did you hear about the guys using an emoticon as their logo? Of like a fruit or something?
Good thing marketing doesn't work on me, or anybody else for that matter.
They go together really poorly. If Moz://a is the Mozilla logo then presumably Curl:// is the Curlill logo ... which it isn't, they follow different paradigms.
Good ideas for some http processing libraries. We already have httpotion and httpoison for Elixir and httparty for Ruby. A pill has its place between them.
Seriously, I disliked all 4 logos that made to Mozilla's shortlist. Moz://a wasn't the worst one graphically, but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right. However I'll keep using Firefox. Hopefully they won't waste many energies into this bug.
> but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right.
they're not changing the name. they're still "mozilla". they will still have "mozilla.org" and you'll still be able to google it. it's just a new logo. people are so over-reacting to this
Non-font designs don't have these problems. Mercedes' three pointed star logo doesn't leave anybody puzzled about the spelling of their name. They have to ask for the name, then it's easy. Letters induce people thinking that the name of the company is what they see in the logo. Imagine you know about a new company from its logo C0mp4ny. I think everybody would assume that the name of the company is C0mp4ny, not Company.
That's actually a great idea for how to dictate urls over the phone, I'm adopting it to whenever I need to dicatate a url to someone who doesn't know that URLs start with an implied "httpill" but is familiar with mozilla's logo. erm.
I hadn't been aware of the new logo until today, so I didn't have any context for what "moz://a" might mean.
After googling about it, and seeing the new logo, I realize that, in the logo, the bottom of the colon, and the bottom of the slashes, lines up with the bottom of the rest of the text.
Conversely, in my system's default font, the colon rises a bit above the bottom of the line, and the slashes descend below it.
When I saw the new logo, I at least was able to read 'mozilla' without squinting, and without confusion, while also seeing the double-meaning of 'moz://a'.
How will it create confusion? Nobody types moz:// in regular usage, so this only effects you if you are specifically looking for an easter egg or something.
Same here, although perhaps that's because for some unknown reason internally I've always said dot-dot-slash-slash for :// so it's odd trying to read it as 'ill'. I don't expect the protocol logo will appear in print form in text very often though so it's not an issue.
"REALLY ought to register "moz" with IANA as well. Otherwise it might pop up as a "real" protocol declaration in the future and we might have a conflict. We can just reserve the prefix so that it's not available for general use. "
But it's just marketing. Marketing "decisions" change all the time, and the approaches are discarded forever.
And we all have one more technical debt.
Let the marketoids do what they do, just keep them as away as possible.
Half of those changes are actually just tests that it works correctly The first three files are the only ones that are doing any useful work, and then the last one makes sure that it works in anything other than a local build.
Note that the logo's rendering does not change the name's spelling. It's still "Mozilla", in the same way that it's Apple (not [apple emoticon]), and Google, not <blue>G</blue><red>o</red><yellow>o</yellow>...
It wasn't my favorite concept at first, but after they refined it to what it is now, I am honestly in awe. I thought the process was bold and refreshing to begin with, but the fact that they arrived at such an excellent identity makes it all the more amazing. The fact that the logo incorporates a URL scheme is genius and perfect. The new zilla font is dope too.
It's a cool concept - but surely there are a lot of regexps our there that will now trigger in vain.
Also search engines will index "moz://a" as a different thing than "mozilla". Likely, the first will be indexed as ["moz", ":", "/", "/", "a"] and the punctuation likely be thrown out, resulting in matches for "moz" and "a".
If they're seeing Mozilla logo somewhere, they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage regarding Mozilla or a product thereof, so all this discussion is in vain and is a parody of itself.
Also, WRT indexing, the logo is an image, not text, so the search engines will either not index it or index it like they index other images, using filename and maybe embedded metadata.
> they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage
or they've seen a sticker on a laptop. Or they've seen a t-shirt, or skimmed a magazine article. And they're now googling it, and ending up on moz.com.
If someone actually links to moz://a, some crawlers might pick it up. But as a crawler has to parse the url and extract the scheme before it can continue, I don't see potential for confusion. Likely, "moz" wouldn't be in the list of supported schemes and the link would simply be dropped.
Why would a search engine index something that is just a local easter egg in the client software? It's not a real protocol, it will definitely redirect to an http website.
It is, however, a valid observation for the use of the string within text. It likely means every search engine needs to now add another exception to their parser to treat moz://a as a word entity.
I think y'all are overthinking this. Mozilla is not changing their name to "Moz://a". It's a logo, that's it. No one has said "Moz://a" is going to be used in text.
Of course they do, and that work continued while other people worked on the rebranding. Also, and more importantly, maintaining an up-to-date brand keeps Mozilla relevant and (hopefully) stops them looking like a throwback to a past era (like, say, Yahoo!). Mozilla needs to do many things to remain an important force on the web. Keeping it's brand is one aspect of that work.
They are very aware it seems based on my observations over the last few years and while I don't agree with everything they do I defend their right to spend a tiny fraction of their time on a logo.
- after all it seems logo, ui and pixel polish etc matters a whole lot more to a lot of people than it does to me so it might be well worth updating.
Me? As long as extensions work and they don't copy too much more (bad imo) ideas like hidden menus and hamburger from Chrome and Mac they are still easily my favourite.
Oh, and they have created a new systems programming language that has managed to exite me and a lot of others here on the northeastern side of the Internet.
People keep talking about Mozilla like it's the engineering wing of the EFF, that it's tirelessly working on a mission of Internet freedom, etc.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I see:
(1) a team of developers, incrementally maintaining a codebase that that was donated by a 1990's commercial entity, and
(2) some second-tier marketing types, burning through Google/Yahoo money and padding their resumes with random "me too" projects that don't last very long.
The flagship browser has only had one major re-think since Netscape's demise, and that re-think was, "We should make its UI and dev cycle look like Chrome's". The most significant "new" project dreamed up by the marketing types was a me-too Android alternative, which they then almost immediately canceled.
The only noteworthy and truly innovative things I can think of coming out of Mozilla have been Rust and Persona, and the latter was also quickly canceled (which was a shame since it's the only example I can think of that REALLY fits the mission statement they talk about).
I'm glad that Firefox is out there to prevent a Google monopoly, and I'm glad that Rust has a financial patron since it's a pretty interesting language. But if Mozilla want to be seen as some greater "force for Internet freedom", beyond just maintaining an dated and declining web browser, then a logo change won't be enough. Actually DO some other stuff without canceling it.
Keeping that thingy running all those years and making sure it is still competitive against Chrome (that has 1000 times the resources + free access to put ads for their browser on two of the highest value ad spots that exists) is an engineering masterpiece as well as a marketing masterpiece if you ask me.
Also you write like Firefox extensions haven't been years ahead of competition (proven by the fact that no other browsers have even come close even Mozilla had proven what was possible) and like tabs where commonplace in browsers before Firefox.
Hey, I love Firefox and I'm glad that Mozilla keeps it running. But the parent comment complains that people never talk about anything other than Firefox. Well...
Also, tabs (like most browser UI innovation over the past 15 years) came from Opera.
Mozilla is constantly working for the open web. Not only do they design products, but they invest in work groups and conference for that.
Hell they even produced and gave away the best documentation on the front end currently existing (MDN).
They finance other open sources projects, try to innovate all the time (they fail often, but trying new things always leads to that), pay dev to do so.
The :// thing is cute, but… did Mozilla really need a new logo? Their existing wordmark may not be especially distinctive, but it is familiar. And they have a distinctive symbol, too.
The new logo looks more contemporary. I'm not sure if that's good. Mozilla can be proud of its history, no?
Ironically googling for moz://a from the address bar doesn't work in Firefox Android. It's interpreting it as a protocol and doesn't send it to Google. It displays a blank page.
Moz://a from google returns moz.com as first result. Ironically again, it's a SEO company. Maybe Mozilla needs their services.
Since Mozilla is a combination of Mosaic + Godzilla, the only good logo for them should have been a dinosaur image laid out in mosaic, that's it. This :// thing is more of a s://y marketing than anything else.
Everything around this redesign is just a clusterfuck: the process, the winner, the hacks introduced to cope with it, the SEO fail, the loss of identity...
Well, weither you like it or not, it's been such a hot topic we can't deny it's a PR success. Now everybody is talking about mozilla, and sharing this branding and logo.
It is well understood by those of us who are more literate in these things that a bikeshed should have a combination of transparent windshield walls and solid green roof. I therefore propose we tear down the existing, functional, bikeshed as its blue walls (which would not look good in orange) are constructed of a material which is not transparent.
Not really. They are talking about a mozilla specific URL handler with a custom (fake) protocol. Something like moz://a would redirect to their motto page, moz://about to their settings or something like that. Switching to chromium and typing mozilla.org would still work.
It's the result of Google throwing their full weight behind Chrome. It's insane not to expect the #1 cash-generating business to take a large bite out of Firefox when they set their mind on creating a browser that ticks all the marks of Mozilla's goals as well: standards-compliant (or setting), fast, secure, open, extensible etc.
And Chrome is now at the absolute core of Google's strategy: they need to make the open web as competitive a platform as possible to stop Facebook's walled garden, or Apple's native platform the future of the web. Because google has no place in those two ecosystems. Thus: Android and Chrome.
Trash-talking Mozilla is only going to make their funding dry up and/or demotivate their employees. But it's in everyone's interest to make sure they thrive. It's only a coincidence that Google and the public's interest are currently aligned. There will come a time in the future where we'll desperately need the competitor that is Firefox. Let's not forget that they were ones lighting a fire under IE from around 2005-2012. Who knows where we'd be without them – .docx instead of .html?
> Yeah, that will totally solve Mozilla's now so slow fading into irrelevance.
Neither will constant picking on anything they do or don't do.
> VideoLAN.org website stats tell me that Firefox hits percentage dropped from 26.3% through Jan 2016 to 21.2% through Jan 2017.
I guess the reason might just be that the market is moving towards a new equilibrium.
Unless we start making websites and web apps that only work in other browsers then the web is big enough for both Firefox and other inferior browsers ;-)
English isn't my mother tongue so I might have misread. What would you call this, in a toplevel comment about what seems to me to be a well received rebranding:
>> Yeah, that will totally solve Mozilla's now so slow fading into irrelevance.
