fuzzyface-love: Mozilla Firefox Logo Evolution & Secrets

Friday, 27 January 2012

Mozilla Firefox Logo Evolution & Secrets

A company’s hallmark of its logo. The work and execution strategy of a company has been changed day by day. When an enormous change is needed, their strategy to introduce themselves to the mass people by changing their branding motif, they have changed their hallmark more or less.

Mozilla Firefox

Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross had created a web browser “Firefox”. The first name of it was Phoenix, which had a clear resemblance with their first logo in 2002. Due to some trade name issues, the name had to be changed to “Firebird”, to retain the same logo. But, again the same problem, trade name issue. Then, they decided to change the total branding including name and logo. By the way, 2nd time change was needed because of existing software.

After that, in October 2003, a professional interface designer Steven Garrity revealed some points which were not consistent with Mozilla’s visual identity. And because of this, Mozilla Foundation invited him to join the recently created Mozilla branding team in the purpose of producing a new logo identity. And then his team’s first effort was Firefox 0.8 (February 2004). Silverorange (Steven Garrity worked there as a creative director) designed the new icon, initial sketched by Stephen Desroches, rendering by Jon Hicks. This icon was first deployed in Firefox 0.8.

The logo was revised and updated later, fixing some flaws: say, modernize the shape of the tail, gave a 3D look by wrapping tails behind the globe, update the texture used for the Firefox and the globe, slightly reduce the overall level of visual complexity in the icon.

Let’s find out some secrets:

Firefox logo reveals a fox, but it’s not a fox. Actually it is a panda, Firefox is a Chinese name for a Red Panda. Panda’s color and motion was partially inspired by the piece of artwork in Daniel Burka’s childhood bible. And this software come up with pandas behavior when he is in the tree, for his name.
There are two controversies, why this logo like this?
- Stephen Desroches, who sketched this logo at first, inspired by a Japanese brush painting of a fox.
- A photographs in space taken at December 17, 2002 by the Hubble Space telescope showed something really similar to the logo which Firefox is using. V838 Monocerotis showed the same star again of the same structure.