Firefox (2019)Copied

By 2019 Firefox was more than a browser. Mozilla was shipping an encrypted file-sharing service, a password manager, breach alerts and the privacy-focused Firefox Focus, and it wanted one brand to hold them together, sold on privacy against what it called Big Tech. The answer was a Firefox parent brand, with its own icon, and a refreshed browser icon to follow later in the year.

The project ran more than 18 months. Following the open process it had used for the Mozilla identity, the in-house team published two candidate systems in 2018 and invited public feedback, and consulted Johnson Banks' Michael Johnson and the designer of the original browser logo along the way.

The parent-brand icon is an abstract flame wrapped into a globe, with no literal fox. Icons for the rest of the family, from Firefox Send to Firefox Focus, share its geometry. The system adds a wider palette of purple, pink, orange and yellow gradients, a shape system derived from the icons for patterns and illustrations, a rounded typeface for product marks, and stricter accessibility rules for colour and type. Mozilla wrapped it in four pillars: radical, kind, open and opinionated.

The final design was led by Ramotion creative director Michael Chu with Mozilla's in-house team.

The Verge had to correct a common misreading on launch day: the abstract mark was not the browser's new logo but an overarching logo for Mozilla's whole family of Firefox products, each of which, including the browser, kept a logo of its own. Mozilla's designers had said the previous July that the fast fox with a flaming tail did not offer enough design tools to represent the family, and had shown routes going either more foxy or more swooshy. The Verge's verdict on the parent mark was that it had more fire and less fox, and looked a little like a world on fire.

Creative Review noted that the glossy graphics and poppy colours felt closer to Instagram or Google than to an open-source underdog, while praising the open process. That tension is the story. The system is coherent and well built for a product family, but the gradients that make it look current also make it look like everyone else, and the fox, the thing people actually loved, was pushed to the browser icon.