Designers react to the Mozilla rebrand

Yesterday, after 10 months in the making, creative agency johnson banks revealed Mozilla's new open source rebrand. The design process took place very publicly, with Mozilla and the johnson banks team inviting input and influence on different routes as the rebrand evolved. And, as expected, the design world had a lot to say about it...

A glorious outcome

Sam Becker, executive creative director at Brand Union says: "I have mixed feelings about crowdsourcing design however you can’t deny that the principles of open source and mass collaboration are at the heart of Mozilla. And, surprising or not surprisingly, depending on which side of the ideological divide you’re on, the outcome is glorious.

"Mozilla has ended up with a beautiful wordmark that will delight programmers and open web advocates around the world. The system, and even the containing box holding the letters, is fairly unremarkable but the typographic solution is gold. It’s a solution that makes me happy to be a designer AND a developer.

Clever idea, last decade

Illustrator Ben O'Brien had this to say: "Hmmmmm, I like that they've done 'something' because their old logotype was as forgettable as... I forget. But to be honest using the :// feels a bit 2005. Clever idea, last decade.

Also :// does look like a dude eating a sandwich. Does anyone even type the whole "http://" anymore? Surely not. Maybe if you're coding, but not your average web user. Also, and I may be totally wrong on this, but I find that if you use symbols like that it appears to be overly 'techy' which isn't what consumers (young and old) want from their browsers, they want easy to use, natural user experiences.

"So I'm not keen on the type, however, I do like some of the little collaged images I've seen. The 'ok' hand with the bird photos and various graphic elements, I like the look of all that, nothing ground-breaking, but it comes together nicely for a broad audience.

"My main concern is the Firefox logo (not that I use it) – that's one of my favourite tech logos of all time! I don't know if that'll be changing, but I'll always remember it fondly."

And, of course, Twitter was inundated with reactions, with many in favour of the new identity...

...and some, not so much:

What do you think of the Mozilla rebrand? Let us know in the comments.

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