Mozilla’s New Brand Plans To ‘Reclaim The Internet’

Source: Fast Company, Mark Wilson
Photo: Mozilla

The branding gurus at JKR overhauled Mozilla’s logo and branding system, leaning into green and repurposing a Shepard Fairey icon as an ASCII dino.

Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, has a new brand. Its first job is to remind you that it’s more than Firefox.

Today, the organization founded in 1998 from the ashes of the early browser company Netscape creates guides to privacy, publishes open-source standards, organizes the community event Mozfest, and operates its own ventures arm. Earlier this year, in an eyebrow-raising twist, Mozilla even acquired Anonym, an advertising platform founded by ex-Meta executives, “a solution for the ads ecosystem to help people have ads be efficient and nonexploitative,” says Lindsey Shepard OBrien, CMO at Mozilla.

Mozilla is a brand of activism navigating and offering products in a world of capitalism. It’s a hard concept to grok, which is why Mozilla met with stakeholders inside and partners outside the organization to think through its own purpose and write its own brand brief as the anchor behind an entirely new logo and brand system.

“We landed on a boilerplate, a playbook, with a positioning statement that this is a people’s platform,” says Amy Bebbington, Mozilla global head of brand. “But what we feel we can talk about externally is [the mantra] ‘reclaim the internet,’ and everything we do is in service of reclaiming the internet.”

The Mozilla brand system

Mozilla’s previous logo was the result of a crowdsource campaign and, unsurprisingly, its stark black-and-white wordmark (with a little :// face snuck in) feels like something an open-source-code enthusiast would type up right in a terminal. In one sense, it was very on brand. On the other, it was a missed opportunity, and borderline exclusionary, to a wider world of people who could appreciate the Mozilla ethos even if they don’t know of it.

Its new logo—and brand system—was developed by Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), in a project lead by executive creative director Lisa Smith (fresh off work on Burger King and Impossible).

Approaching the project, Smith notes that Mozilla’s brand felt bifurcated, and even self-defeating.

“For government policy and reports—talking about their mission and things with AI—it was more black and white—simple, but lacked a personality and expression,” says Smith. “Then on the other end, when doing all these incredible events like Mozfest, it was all the colors—and all different.”

At the foundation of the brand—even the logo—was a sans-serif typeface. Clean sans serfis are a common approach to tech brands in particular, but Smith notes that they’re so common that Mozilla could often appear as any tech company.

“Knowing that big tech is our enemy, we don’t want to fall into the digital wind tunnel where everything looks the same,” says Smith. “Sans typefaces could be any digital brand. How do we create personality?”

The new brand system offers many answers to all these problems, though much like Mozilla itself, it’s hardly simplistic.

Starting with the typeface and a new wordmark, JKR commissioned a new Mozilla Semi Slab by Studio Drama. It’s rich and curvy, with a juxtaposition of blocky terminals that sit on the letters like Minecraft blocks. (A new sans serif accompanies it for legibility in some contexts).

The new logo is written in Mozilla Semi Slab, punctuated with an ASCII dinosaur drawn from its forms—which supports a structured ode to bitmaps expressed across the brand system. The dinosaur is a double wink. It alludes to the previous Mozilla logo with its ://, but then it traces further back to Netscape’s quirky dinosaur mascot, named Mozilla, which became a fire engine red T. rex when drawn by Shephard Fairey for the launch of mozilla.org in 1998. While the previous Mozilla was static, the new Mozilla (whose new name is pending crowdsourcing) will often appear as part of digital UX.
“It can shout in a positive, activist way—not in a mean way!” says Smith. “Reverberating, he shakes the ground and helps wipe screens.”

Adding color and texture

Atop all the typography, JKR considered how to reconcile the old color system’s split personality, which deployed a mismatching rainbow of colors for community projects and a Swiss-inspired black-and-white color scheme for policy work.

The solution for framing those buttoned-up, black-and-white government and policy reports is grounded in green—or, actually, a gradient of greens that make their way across covers, iconography, and other promotional materials. Meanwhile, pink and orange are brought in for the most playful community-oriented initiatives, like podcasts and live events. And if you squint, you can see a bit of tie-back to Mozilla’s browser.

“It’s important we didn’t create something that felt completely removed from Firefox,” says Bebbington. “We see this as one of those really nice ways to nod to shared DNA.”

If the new brand colors look more muted than you might expect, that’s because they were toned down with less vibrance and fewer shocking, full-bleed appearances, following an accessibility audit—which JKR responded to with the wider color gradients you see here.

“If you saw this a month ago, it probably had more full bleed of colors that graphic designers get very excited about!” Smith laughs. “[But] what’s been wonderful about the process is that it makes the work stronger, if you’re open to hearing feedback.”

As the final articulation of the brand system, all of these colors will appear on a grid that combines 2D bitmaps and 3D wireframes, each with various levels of expressiveness to further distinguish the seriousness or expressiveness of the work (though exactly how that will work in practice I’m still curious to see).

Undoubtedly, Mozilla has adopted a brand system as intricate as its own organization. But nobody says that reclaiming the internet will be simple. Well, without loads more antitrust regulation, at least.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Wilson is the Global Design Editor at Fast Company. He has written about design, technology, and culture for almost 15 years

https://www.fastcompany.com/91193686/mozillas-new-brand-plans-to-reclaim-the-internet