Mozilla (2017)Copied

Mozilla's problem was that most people heard the name and thought only of Firefox. In mid-2016 it set out to rebrand as a champion of a healthy, open internet, and chose to do it in the open. Rather than stage a surprise reveal and defend it afterwards, Mozilla and London studio Johnson Banks posted their routes online, seven at one stage, and invited comment. Over five months the teams reviewed around 3,000 comments; they were not votes, but Wired reported they shaped the choice.

The winner writes the name as moz://a, replacing the ill with the colon and slashes of a URL. Creative director Tim Murray told Wired the point was that anyone would know this was an internet company. The wordmark sits in a black box and is set in Zilla, a slab serif commissioned from Peter Bilak's Typotheque, picked for its localisation expertise, and released free. Zilla nods to Courier, the old default coding font, and bucks the sans-serif fashion. Anyone can make the logo by typing and highlighting it.

The system went beyond the mark: a proposed colour palette, a language architecture and an imagery approach, which Mozilla said it would refine with community feedback. Murray wanted the letters-only logo to welcome the maker community to customise it with photos, graphics or GIFs. Rival routes with a dinosaur head or fireworks would have made that harder.

Wired explained why the process mattered as much as the result. Instead of a surprise reveal followed by a defensive essay, Mozilla published its candidate designs and invited comment, reviewing around 3,000 responses over five months. The comments were not votes, but they helped tip the choice toward the URL fragment. Creative director Tim Murray wanted a mark that told people this was an internet company, not just the Firefox people, and that the community could play with: a letters-only logo leaves room to drop in a photo or GIF, where rivals built around a dinosaur head or fireworks would not.

Wired argued the most interesting thing was how well the open process worked: people wrote essays about the options. The result is clever in a way designers love and some found too clever, but it does exactly what Murray asked. It tells you what Mozilla is, it is free to use, and it costs nothing to reproduce. Few logos are so faithful to the organisation they represent.