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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Only foxes chasing their tails look like Firefox.

Everything which is not recognizably a circular fox-thing is something else.

Hypothesis: marketing people are afraid to continue a brand identity that can go on for decades, because that kind of success means that they don't have a redesign project every three years.

AT&T has been a variation on the Death Star since 1984.

IBM has been horizontally striped initials since 1972.

NBC is a peacock.

McDonald's is golden arches.

Firefox should be a flaming fox chasing its tail.

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I very much agree. Marketing people will always want to design fresh things because that's what they love to do. Once their product dies, they move on to something else.

Marketing people also believe that you can sell anything with a fresh coat of paint. They are trained to sell.

I think the new icons are awful. You don't even see it's Firefox anymore. God I dislike marketing people so much. :(

> You don't even see it's Firefox anymore

Are Mozilla's designers simply following the 'debranding' or 'decorporatizing' trend? [1] [2]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-age...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649985

Opened that Atlantic article and it prompted my phone for camera a d microphone permissions.

This often works out poorly. Tide lost market share / suffered pushback when it changed it's branding / colors even a little bit.

https://hbr.org/2017/01/customer-loyalty-is-overrated

The new icons aren’t intended for Firefox itself; they’re intended for projects like Quantum, or developer tools, or other parts of the FF ecosystem that should look “Firefox-y.”

What happend is that web design got more professional compared to times when FF started out as a brand, and they want to appeal to web designers (and graphic designers entering the field) and the overall design community, which has a bias towards modern minimal designs, where Firefox doesn't really fit in.

Their Mozilla rebrand was fresh. It could be a good idea to start a new brand, and develop the name and shapes together, without the limitations of the existing Firefox brand. With all the design talent surrounding them, they could come up with something stunning.

If they don't have anything to design they are fired and have to go find another job. So they actively look for things to design and propose changes.

Remember the moz://a brand change? I wonder if there is any way to measure the benefits of it, except for the paychecks to the designers.

Edit: I realized that it could be another thing. They are signalling they are alive and well. Similar to buying a 200k sport car. See how much money I can afford to do without?

Changing a famous logo is almost always a bad idea. The reputation of a brand is inextricably tied to the logo, for some reason in the buyer's mind. If you change it, the feelings have to start from scratch.

It doesn't matter if the font is outdated. Think if Coca-Cola changed its logo, or the New York Times, or Pininfarina. Okay, that last one was for me. I don't expect most people to know Pininfarina.

Worked for Adidas. Toyota too?

They design Ferrari's and put a big badge on the side - lot of Ferrari fans out there :-)

Designed, recent Ferraris are designed in-house.

> Think if Coca-Cola changed its logo

Semi-related, Pepsi has made major changes to their logo multiple times, https://www.logaster.com/blog/pepsi-logo/

Coca-Cola's changes have been less dramatic, the font has mostly stayed the same.

They have an opportunity to being a bunch of really cute animals if they want a suite of logos. A big part of why I was attracted to Firefox when I was young is I had a brand association in my mind “it a fiery-fox, the fastest browser on the planet” (I guess until chrome came along). With quantum it feels fast and lightweight again.

Same with thunderbird mail client. I iconic logo and a brand that would make an imprint.

I guess I always had a thing for animals. That’s what Ubuntu was my favorite distro. The names - Breezy Badger, Warty Warthog e.t.c

Animals evoke an emotion, they represent something.

Related: if anyone hasn't seen this before, you have to check out the infamous, utterly bizarre pitch for Pepsi's latest logo: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

Don't forget to dimensionalize exponentially, kids!

This is one of the dumbiest things I've ever seen.

Amazing.

> This is one of the dumbiest things I've ever seen.

> dumbiest

Dumbest..?

I think it's great. The pitch is a cheesy piece of art itself.

And Pepsi actually chose that logo!

What the fuck is that. I know you're not supposed to say fuck on HN, but seriously, what the fuck is that?!

Please tell me this is a joke and not just the golden number's version of an Onion article. Actually - you don't even need to. I've seen marketing material that's very similar to this kind of psuedointellectual garbage.

This is in "so bad it is good" territory - sharing it with my design team tomorrow morning.

At the time this was released, I worked at a marketing agency (not Arnell, but in the same family) that was Pepsi's Agency of Record for a number of businesses.

When we got a copy of this proposal, we thought that either Arnell had lost his mind, the entire agency was poisoned with a noxious gas, or it was a joke.

Funny, I like Pepsi, but it confused me when they changed the logo. (I guess because I don't watch TV.) At first I probably thought it was some cheap knock-off.

All those fancy words, and yet they couldn't manage simple number agreement -- "reoccurring phenomena".

This made my day, it looks like a proposal Gavin Benson would buy.

> or Pininfarina. Okay, that last one was for me. I don't expect most people to know Pininfarina.

I expect that most people would understand what a Pininfarina-esque logo on a car would signify, even if they don't know the name Pininfarina.

He Man, I drove a Ferrari Mythos Pininfarina! At least I did, in Test Drive 3 on my 386 [0]

[0] https://classicreload.com/test-drive-iii-the-passion.html

Fascinating that you describe the logo as a fox chasing its tail. I’ve always thought of it as a fox snuggling up around a blue sphere (which I always interpreted as Earth or a globe).

The plot thickens...

Some versions of it clearly have the fox curled around a planet, but not all.

My twenty pound marmalade-and-cream Maine Coon chases his own tail on occasion, doing a pretty good impression of the Firefox logo.

We are in a design bubble (we have been for a few years now). There are way more designers than there is meaningful design work to do, and they need to justify their existence and paycheck. Hence all your favorite companies doing complete, yet more often than not misguided, redesigns every other year.

(I am currently employed as a designer)

Some bad managers outright encourage unnecessary redesigns. It's a lot easier and often cheaper to change the product's skin than lead a dysfunctional dev team through fixing crippling tech debt or adding meaningful new features.

As a former Mozilla donor, I think this blog post communicates “we have more money than we know what to do with.”

Donations to Mozilla don't (probably can't, legally) go to Firefox development. Mozilla Foundation is a charity, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit enterprise. Money can flow from the Corp to the Foundation but not in reverse.

So if you give money to the Foundation, the Corporation has to give less to the Foundation to keep it funded. You could as well have given money directly to the Corporation.

Depends on if the Foundation is tax deductible (501c in USA?).

I have a theory that we're almost always in a design bubble.

Look back in the history of most major brands, icons and trademarks and the ones that most people would consider classic all seem to come from two or three distinct eras.

The rest can be viewed as "what the hell were they thinking/smoking?", cargo culting the current fashion and much jumping on bandwagons.

Looking at tech, designers have held very little power historically. Examples are few and far between, with Apple being the most notable outlier. Old Apple did not change the status quo much - it was a golden child for less than a decade after all - the 80s and 90s saw very little tech companies where designers were calling the shots. Only when New Apple rose from the ashes did tech start to deeply prioritize value design. Nowadays, many startups have design cofounders, major companies like Airbnb or Dropbox regularly and prominently show the influence of their design teams, and so on.

It definitely feels like an overcorrection right now - many designers will surely be amongst the first to go in the next recession.

(As far as fields other than tech, they’re all completely different stories regarding their relationship to visual design)

Design it how it works, not how it looks.

That is the biggest problem with the current "designer" bubble.

agreed. modernize it all you want, change the colors, make it "flat", make it "metro", make it "material", I don't care.

as long as it's a fox chasing its tail. That IS Firefox.

Yeah, perhaps they just need to swap out the globe for new objects?

Well as long as it has a fox and some form of firey colors, going around the globe , it’s easy to know that it’s firefox.

But I also know after working with a number of designers, that doing re-branding of a major company is kind of a hallmark event in their careers, and this is the reason we have an evolution of brands.

I do hope they stick to the silhouette though. Apple is still very recognizable after a number of logo changes. It’s still an Apple.

Firefox being that circle makes no sense.

Changing a good and established logo to an even better, universally loved logo would be great.

So far I don't see anything which is better that the current logo, though. Those might be fine logos for other projects, but none of the variants offered does a better job of saying "Firefox the browser" than what we have now.

Well, please keep iterating; finding a great logo takes creating a huge lot of variants that don't make it, and a lot of time.

I've noticed that Pepsi has gone from the asymmetrical smiley face back to the original logo on some products. Changing the logo probably just causes confusion when the identification process is almost subconscious.

I definitely agree with not changing recognizable brands, but I wonder how much the fact that those companies have their logo printed on products, lots of stationary, buildings, etc. influenced their decision.

Compared to let's say IBM-who has their logo printed on millions of computers-Firefox being a digital product might make it easier to change the logo.

Why is it a fox at all? Shouldn't it be a lesser panda?

It should be a pandicorn.

Originally it was a bird; Firebird. But as there already existed a software product with that name, after some time it was changed. Probably fox was the next best animal to go with fire.

Before it was called Firebird, it was called Phoenix (I don't remember the related icons though) [1]. The name's also referenced in about:mozilla

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Phoenix_0.1...

Phoenix used a mozilly icon [1] for the file image and a Phoenix [2] for the about image.

[1] https://imgur.com/223ev57

[2] https://imgur.com/OiAwuvB

As others have noted, it’s more of a fox wrapped around a globe — the icon made at a time when the competition (IE) had a circular icon which was an “e” with a ring around it.

I did think it harked back well to the old Gecko icon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)

I mean, they gave a justification: they wanted to create a design system so that their different offerings, like Firefox Focus and apparently other things, can have their own consistent icons. Also, I don't see anyone suggesting it shouldn't resemble a fox. The new icons don't look hugely difficult to recognize and it's mostly an incremental change imo

The Sun Microsystem Logo uses the same rotational symmetry group as the swastika, but spells out the name of the company.

IIRC it was designed by a relative amateur at design, a CS professor at Stanford.

But what you are missing is, before 1984, AT&T's logo was different. They re-did their branding in 1984. So what's to say that this isn't Mozilla's opportunity to rebrand Firefox?

Also, Firefox's logo was a Phoenix from 2002 - 2004, did you know that?

>>before 1984, AT&T's logo

84 was shortly after AT&T was forcibly broken up and essentially became a different company.

>>Also, Firefox's logo was a Phoenix from 2002 - 2004

yeah, when it was firebird

It was never Firebird - that's a database product - but indeed it was Phoenix.

I messed up the time line a little: they were phoenix from 02-03 and firebird from 03-04. I thought firebird was longer lived than that.

I'm afraid you're mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Naming

Thanks for the correction. It was renamed away because of the database product, at least.

> yeah, when it was firebird

Yeah, so they rebranded. That's what I'm saying.

The big idea here is that Firefox is made by and for individuals who don't appreciate good design.

circular referencing is freak symbolism; I don't know why this would be a good logo for any brand.

I've never read Firefox's logo as "chasing own tail". I see it rather as "covering the whole planet".

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