» The democratic redesign of the Firefox icon
Mozilla has made the redesign of the Firefox icon a public process, updates posted as the design evolves. If you’d think one such as myself would find this an awesome insight into the creative process of a super-talented designer (Anthony Piraino), you’d be wrong.
Brand New puts it this way:
Back in May, on the blog of Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer on Firefox, the process of redesigning the icon began, then we got a rare chance of seeing the brief for the redesign (…) And then the design process began with Iteration 1. And, lord have mercy on the designers, they posted another 13 iterations for the public to comment.Lord have mercy on them indeed. I hope Mozilla did this just to share the process with the community, and not to gauge their approval mid-way through. I also hope they had the good sense not to present Anthony with choice posts - or worse, ask him to read through all the comments - as he worked his magic on the icon. No part of that sounds like it would improve the final product in any way. The man is already amazing at what it does - that’s why they hired him.
The following is not a perfect analogy, but here goes anyway: read this brief Wired story on the awful, awful song that was produced by public committee.
Also, as Brand New points out, this was not a radical redesign, so I’m wondering just how interesting it was to follow along anyway.
I do like seeing the designer reject the “flame” idea but kept subtler updates: Smoother fur, a little more land on the planet, and a tail that wraps beyond the horizon so the icon looks less like a 2D fox over a 3D world.
