IMO all the concepts are giving too much emphasis on big slick graphics and too little on content. I was still left asking "what's your point?" and "am I on a band's website?"
I like that in the current design the focus is on the products. I wish they'd maintain that and use the emphasis on products as the starting point for the redesign.
More people care about Mozilla's products than the idea of open-source.
There's a difference between Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com. These designs are for Mozilla.org, home of information about what Mozilla as an organization and the Mozilla foundation are about (as well as for developer resources, which I imagine would be a little less heavy handed than the landing page, regardless of what style is chosen) -- not for Mozilla.com, the product-focused site intended to handle download requests and information about Firefox and Thunderbird.
I think that, while these designs might be a little art heavy for some, they are on the right track, as when you're talking about Mozilla as a public organization and an umbrella of properties, it makes sense to have the sites talking about their broader goals and trying to educate people about the ideas behind the group. Mozilla.com can "sell you" on Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla.org can do the same for the principles and resources behind the products.
I get that they want to talk more about their principles, but ever heard of "show, don't tell"? If Mozilla really is a vibrant community, then the front page should demonstrate this by being useful to that community. Links to all the things that Mozilla developers do, or mailing lists, or whatever else.
People know when they are being sold. These web page designs are trying to sell. The "product" is that Mozilla is better because of its principles and because there's a community. I admire Mozilla a lot, but... newsflash: NOBODY CARES. Users don't care. Developers sort of care but they know about Mozilla already. If they are looking for donors, perhaps some deluded people think "community" is automatically great, but I'd think it would be more effective to talk about success stories and how provably influential Mozilla is. Once the potential donor is fished in, then talk about why this happens at Mozilla and not at Microsoft.
Even as a marketing website these designs are not very fresh nor do they get to the heart of what makes open source different. It's like someone said "global community" and the designer thought "global... global... how about a globe?" and "community... community... I know, constructivist graphics reminiscent of 1920s communism!" These designs are clueless about what a real software community is like.
"Show don't tell" is an extremely valid point. I guess I was pleased enough to see that it was so apparent that they told their designers what they were excited about and that it was not the sort of thing that a professionally designed marketing-style website tries to ever communicate, that I was blinded to the fact that I was being punched in the face by a lot of telling and not a lot of showing.
Wow. This really brings back the Blake Ross interview from Founders at Work, where he was talking about how the Mozilla developers and designers just plain didn't understand Real People. His descriptions of the crazy design ideas those guys were coming up with read like they were critiquing the designs in this article. It's actually spooky.
The funny thing is, this was the reason that FireFox forked from Mozilla in the first place, and the reason why it became popular with regular people. Now it's back as the main branch of Mozilla, and it looks like the Crazy Communist Dinosaur team is back at the helm.
At the release of Mozilla 1.0, the website looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org... -- clearly targeted towards developers, with product download links hidden in a nondescript column. I suppose that's what Ross was talking about: The site didn't offer any convincing arguments as to why you'd want to download their browser, and didn't make it easy to do so.
Nowadays, the download site has moved to mozilla.com which is very much targeted at "Real People", and .org is about evangelism and developer info, at least the first of which these designs reflect quite well. If they go overboard it's on the marketing speak and boldness, but certainly not on technical details and programmer jargon like the old mozilla.org did.
That said, the .com vs .org distinction is probably confusing: They should just move Firefox to firefox.com and drop the Mozilla brand from it altogether.
I remember the same interview. They have also forgotten what made Firefox popular in the first place, it was simple, fast and secure. FF is starting to become bloat again - and it will eventually be eclipsed by the KHTML based browsers like Chrome simply because they will go back to the Mozilla way rather than the Firefox way
I think these designs fail pretty badly, for the first part, I think I can see around 1/2 elements on each design with my browser opened at slightly than larger size. which is more than enough for every other website I use.
I dont care for the open source propoganda, as far as I can tell from these designs is mozilla want to engage the community a bit more, but nothing pulls me in. I would guess I am in the target market for this and I am not in anyway more inclined to become part of mozillas community
and only 1 of the 3 even have a somewhat decent introduction to the suite!
The huge header graphics are a joke, I'm at a 1920x1600 screen but still get the vertical scrollbar at my normal browser-size.
I also find all offered layouts annoyingly cluttered and uncomfortable to read. The artsy colors and low contrast may work for a webdesign studio portfolio - but I'll prefer the current mozilla.org over each of them any day.
I mentioned the same point but it isnt really the most important part of the site, obviously a number of people will be looking for firefox etc so it should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com
but this is mozilla.org, its about the community and the developers, .com is about the products
>it should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com
Theoretically, yeah. But see, a lot of people know mozilla is a non-profit. And thus, must automatically type mozilla.org instead of .com. IMO the two should show the same site.
Of course they must have more solid data and hopefully they are using it to make their decisions.
Try an I'm Feeling Lucky for "Firefox." "A lot of people know Mozilla is non-profit," sure, but more people know that there is a browser called "Firefox" and don't give two craps about Mozilla or non-profit or open source or anything else. Surely there will be some fringe cases, but I bet most people who still go to "mozilla.org" for Firefox requests are die-hard old FF/Moz fans from before the .com site appeared, or developers. Most people will, I'd bet, just google Firefox or type in "firefox.com" and be correct.
That line "a postmodern style that would make artists like Robert Rauschenberg proud" makes me shudder.
It gives me the sense that, like many designers, they are in frustrated-artist mode. They don't care so much about what Mozilla needs as their personal desire to make super-sized gorgeous graphics that wow their colleagues.
Believe me, I understand the motivation... but I don't think these designs are going to help Mozilla.
I'm a little baffled by the 3rd redesign and FutureRuby's (http://futureruby.com/) choice of using a Soviet Russia inspired design. I get that they have a futuristic edge to them, and that this is considered cool. But the connotations these designs can imply may make it really difficult to get approval/funding/adoption by gray hairs.
If they actually implemented them they wouldn't be mockups. If they hacked together some shim to get the text represented as in-browser text instead of baked into the image, people would waste time shitting on their code. Some people prototype extremely quickly in Photoshop, some people prototype extremely quickly in a text editor. No need to hate. :( I imagine, also, that if there really is any irony there, they do understand it.
The first design is easily the best, but none are very good. They need to tone down the approach significantly -- all of them are too cluttered to really extract the information people will care about. They need to do something bold and h2-like to explain quickly (one sentence, ideally) what Mozilla is, and then say "Here are our products:" with big, paragraph-level links, icons, and descriptions to Mozilla's flagships, with miscellaneous/other information at the bottom with modest 200x200 pixel icons and three-four items per line, or something like that. They're going way, way overboard -- this can and should be almost all text that follows the reader's flow and puts all the pertinent information right there. Ads for opensource can be placed below the fold or on a separate page. I'm tempted to do a mockup; Mozilla, feel free to send me money if you want one. ;)
IMO all the concepts are giving too much emphasis on big slick graphics and too little on content. I was still left asking "what's your point?" and "am I on a band's website?"
I like that in the current design the focus is on the products. I wish they'd maintain that and use the emphasis on products as the starting point for the redesign.
More people care about Mozilla's products than the idea of open-source.