Features

The brand that time forgot: Mozilla’s identity revival

With attention gently fading, Mozilla was in dire need of a strategy shift to reassert its values of openness and accessibility. Jack Cousins discovers how the organisation is rebranding for the next era of tech.

For many of the world’s biggest tech brands, telling the story of who they really are can be problematic. From the brand design down to the coding itself, the art of obfuscation often comes into play. This becomes more understandable when considering the numerous allegations that have been made over the past two decades against the industry giants. This includes – but is by no means limited to – anti-competitive behaviour, the use of sweatshops and the violation of people’s digital privacy. It is natural for this to happen in a ridiculously influential – and lucrative – industry, as is the necessity to paint a different, far prettier picture.

Then again, some organisations operating in this murky landscape inherit a more positive story to tell. Take long-standing industry contrarian Mozilla, which touts itself as ‘a global community of activists, technologists and builders dedicated to keeping the internet dynamic and accessible, empowering people worldwide to contribute and create.’ For over 25 years – a lengthy timespan in the tech world – the Mozilla project, as it first came to be known, has pursued a different path. Its tale goes something like this:

Members of now-defunct US computer services company Netscape released its browser suite source code in the late ‘90s, thereby unleashing a wave of creativity amongst internet programmers. The efforts of community members helped pave the way for a new and improved Netscape browser that offered a choice to users and eventually led to the creation of Mozilla 1.0. Despite still being outgunned by Internet Explorer, Mozilla members persisted; they created Phoenix (now Firefox), which offered a high-quality browsing experience, while the non-profit Mozilla Foundation was launched in 2003 to formalise the managing of daily operations. The independent organisation’s biggest feat to date, Firefox, commanded a global market share of around 30% by 2009. Though this figure has dwindled, its for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, has since released many products aligned with the aim of promoting ‘openness, innovation and opportunity’ on the internet.

Settling on a design code

Authentically grassroots and deliciously nerdy, the Mozilla story is a perfect branding cocktail just waiting to be mixed. Of course, attempts to illustrate its bold personality have been made before. At the point of launching mozilla.org, right at the project’s inception, its iconic Tyrannosaurus rex mascot was designed by US contemporary artist and activist Shepard Fairey. Fierce looking with its sharp edges and stark red colour, the logo lasted around 14 years before being placed into ‘retirement’. The dinosaur remained dormant for many years, and was excluded during the 2017 Mozilla rebrand that added a colon and two forward slashes to the wordmark, mimicking coding language and style. However, positive sentiment towards the lovable mascot never went fully extinct.

The considerable history on both the company and design front provided fertile ground for an organisation wanting to re-enter the public eye. So Mozilla, for the first time in the best part of a decade, decided to undergo a sizeable rebrand with the hope of defining its direction for the next quarter of a century.

Its global head of brand, Amy Bebbington, says, “We've been around for 25 years, but haven’t always been in the spotlight – that's part of what this brand project was all about. But we’ve always been committed to our mission, which is to make the internet accessible and open to everyone, that it should be a public resource and a safe place for people to be.”

Mozilla initially called on branding and design agency DesignStudio to craft a brand promise capable of underlining the principles a new strategy would adhere to. Bebbington was keen for stakeholders – including employees and the broader Mozilla community – to be listened to, in a process that would ultimately attempt to define Mozilla’s DNA and how that could be communicated. Its ‘reclaim the internet’ strategy was settled on in homage to the brand’s activist roots, but another global branding agency, Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), would be brought into the fold to deliver the identity from there on out.

Bringing the strategy to fruition

For JKR’s executive strategy director, Melanie McShane, it was clear from the “thrilling” brief the direction that should be taken. She says, “I think we’re at a time where tech is really at this inflection point. A lot of the brands are very much these monoliths, and we wanted to make sure we had a playfulness in the brand.”

Nowhere was this more apparent throughout the ‘Grassroots to Government’ design system than in the cleverly reimagined brand symbol, which brims with historical references while also laying out future intentions. It sees a flag, created in ASCII style (a form of text-based visual art), comprising a pole and the Mozilla ‘M’. Look a little closer and an out-of-place pixel helps resemble the old Tyrannosaurus rex mascot. The symbol’s trump card is its ability to fully transform into the dinosaur, making full use of the brand’s heritage in a reimagined yet familiar way.

McShane explains, “Flags are so emblematic of being an activist. People use them to symbolise belief, peace, unity, teams, etc, so that was a breakthrough [for us].”

The symbol is accompanied by a simplified wordmark with custom characters that ditches the colon and slashes but still feels aesthetically appropriate for a tech organisation. Working with UK-based type specialists Studio Drama, the project placed a considerable emphasis on innovating the brand’s once generic general typefaces. The new custom typefaces – Mozilla Semi-Slab, Mozilla Sans and Mozilla Sans Text – were deliberately designed to create cut-through in a sea of ‘tech sans’.

But what arguably differentiates the updated Mozilla brand more than anything else is its colour choice. The “no-nonsense and extremely recognisable” palette, as McShane describes it, sees the unusual combination of black, white and vibrant green. McShane explains, “Again, it’s quite different from a lot of the tech norms at the moment. We talked a lot about the 'blandification' [of the industry] and saw this as another opportunity to feel true to the internet as opposed to big tech.”

The tone of voice – designed to be humorous and culturally relevant – follows along much the same lines. Keen to differentiate itself from the “faux friendliness” that McShane believes to dominate tech, it’s also deemed to be effective at getting people's attention and driving action.

One of the more subtle details attended to throughout the overall design process was ensuring that the brand be as accessible as possible. Mozilla even brought another design partner onboard, Purple, which helped push the brand “beyond today's accessibility standards,” according to Bebbington, therefore putting them ahead of the competition. This seems particularly pertinent to Mozilla as an organisation that has always fancied itself for offering the best possible online experience.

Further evolutions

Despite all these undoubted design improvements, Mozilla remains a complicated organisation with a brand architecture system that’s tricky to fathom. This, too, will change, says Bebbington, but it will take time as the new brand is gradually rolled out.

She adds, “We've drawn the landscape of what we think it would look like across the portfolio. As you can imagine, it's quite a hefty workload, but there definitely are plans to bring the brand into other parts of the portfolio as well. It was fully our intention to unify Mozilla and set us up for its next era.”

Even with the brand having not yet fully been brought into play, Mozilla has already recorded a 1.2-point brand equity increase in the US since the brand reveal and an increase of three points in the UK. Beyond statistics alone, there is a tangible feeling at Mozilla that the new identity has reached a level of enthusiasm that wasn’t achieved in 2017. As far as the goal of creating greater public awareness goes, the project is a success so far. However, there is still a long way to go to ensuring its products – so disparate in design as they are – begin to be understood within the context of Mozilla. If the project is to be a roaring success, that may end up being its greatest challenge.