…and they’ve chosen Moises Lara as the winner of Mozilla México’s logo design contest. In addition to being a very cool logo (I love the Aztec-ish interpretation of the Mozilla dino), it’s a great example of what’s possible when we harness the power of our design community. Kudos to Moises, Mozilla México and everyone who voted for making it happen.

This is one of my favorite times of the year, when the weather turns cold and children of all ages begin to feel the excitement of Ken Kovash Day. It really is a magical season.

But, as hard as it might be for you and me to believe, there are some cynics out there who don’t believe in Ken Kovash. They say he’s a myth, a figment, even an artificial creation designed solely to sell metrics-related merchandise.

Whenever these naysayers start to bring me down, I like to turn to the classic editorial written by Francis Pharcellus Church in the September 21, 1897 edition of the New York Sun. Church’s eloquent response to young Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter has captivated generations of Ken Kovash fans, and it is in the true spirit of Ken Kovash Day that I share it with you now:

“Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Ken Kovash. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Ken Kovash?

No Ken Kovash! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

Happy Ken Kovash Day, everyone!

Just wanted to put up a short post giving some props to the new QMO site. I was only loosely involved - Jay Patel managed this one - but I really like how it retains some of the funky, handmade elements from mozilla.com while also creating its own look.

The site was designed by Airbag Industries, and the snazzy logo and bug illustration were created for us last year by Rubber Design.

The term ‘community’ gets thrown around a lot at Mozilla, and with good reason: the community really is Mozilla. Without it we never would have built a browser that went from zero to 20% worldwide marketshare in just four years, we never would have served up one billion add-on downloads and we never would have set a world record with the Firefox 3 launch (among many other accomplishments).

So, following the successful examples of our developers, localizers, marketers, QA testers, etc we’re going to be making a major push to organize and grow our visual design community. I’ll share more details soon - including our plans to create a new site for posting and sharing your artwork - but if you’re curious to learn more the first thing to do is sign up for our new design mailing list.

Of course, there already is a Mozilla design community - just look at the 3,500+ people who participated in our Firefox 3 t-shirt contest or Google around for Firefox art - but there’s so much more that can be done. This is an entirely new way we can put our greatest advantage to good use, and we should get a lot of cool stuff to look at, too. The possibilities are incredibly exciting.

In the meantime, here’s that mailing list link again (we promise not to spam you!). More to come…

Interestingly, both Mozilla and Microsoft unveiled new t-shirt initiatives last week, and although there are obviously more important things about each company than the way they sell shirts, the differences between the two stores say a lot about the way we each do business.

Microsoft’s new Softwear line launched with a fancy party and some retro 80’s-styled shirts created by hip hop star Common. Their store looks good and features a bunch of undoubtedly well-designed shirts, but the whole thing also feels pretty forced, in the way it usually does when a massive multinational corporation tries to show that it’s ‘down with the kids’.

On the other hand, we launched our Community Store with not much more than a few blog posts, and we just grabbed some folks from around the office to be the models. Instead of having celebrities create our shirts, we’ve put our brand in the hands of our community to see what they could come up with…the results certainly look good to me.

Surely a proliferation of stories in the media about how the “browser t-shirt wars” are heating up can’t be far behind…

(hat tip to Jane for the heads up on this)

There’s some amazing stuff happening in our worldwide design community…like the ongoing Mozilla México logo contest, for example. Last summer, Ricardo Meza and his team of volunteers put out a call to local designers to see who could create the best logo for their corner of the Mozilla universe, and they ended up getting 281 entries from 156 different designers.

The best thing is that nearly all of those 281 entries are really good. It’s inspiring to see our community produce work of this quality, and makes me excited to roll out some similar initiatives that Tara and I are planning on a global scale next year.

In the meantime, you can help Mozilla México out by going to their site and casting your vote for which of the eight finalists should become their *official* logo. The voting area is over in the right sidebar, and will be open until December 16 (with the winner being announced on December 20).

Thanks to Mozilla México for opening up their process and making this happen!

Another Firefox 3.x beta means another action scene featuring everyone’s favorite open source robot. In this latest installment, our hero is somewhere in Japan, rapidly speeding towards Shiretoko National Park (and thus, the 3.1 release).

The robot himself wasn’t all that visible on the 3.1. beta 1 first run page - it was just a back view as he prepared to begin his journey - but as 3.1 is taking shape, so is the robot. His look has changed a bit, too…with the help of mecha artist Josh Burcham, he’s evolved into a style more appropriate for his Japanese surroundings (speaking of which, the scene was loosely based on this photo of Lake Ashi).

Stay tuned for more…in the meantime don’t forget to download Firefox 3.1 beta 2!

Today is the first day of the No Laundry in December crusade (details at Giant Spatula; more details at Chicks Who Click). It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a genuine grassroots movement (especially if you’ve already shaved this month), so dig up your old Firefox shirts and free yourself from the shackles of the washing machine.

If I know one thing about the Mozilla community it’s that people love t-shirts. So, I’m very excited about today’s launch of the Mozilla Community Store, which opens up our t-shirt creative process in some very cool ways.

Tara Shahian has all the details over on MusingT, but the gist of it is that now you don’t need to wait for us to produce a shirt you like. Instead, you can create you own design inspired by Firefox (or Thunderbird, Camino, etc) and upload it to the Store’s public gallery where you or anyone else can purchase it in a variety of different colors and shirt styles. Or, you can just browse through other people’s designs in the gallery - we already have 60 up there now and hope to have many more soon.

Looking at the bigger picture, this is a huge step towards Tara’s and my longer term goal of organizing and expanding the Mozilla visual design community. There are already plenty of people out there doing Firefox-related design - just look at the 3,500 people who participated in our t-shirt contest or all the fan art floating around the Web - but there’s also so much untapped potential just waiting to be harnessed. I’ll be blogging about our vision for this much more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

The successful launch of the Community Store was due to a lot of people’s hard work over the last few months, but in particular I’d like to thank Ryan Doherty, Alex Buchanan and Mike Morgan from our amazing WebDev team (those guys can build anything), IT mastermind Aravind Gottipati, legal guru Catherine Brady, Stephen “Eagle Eye” Donner from QA and our PR goddess, Melissa Shapiro. And extra special props are due to Tara, who oversaw the entire process from start to finish (she did the visual design, too). When she and I originally had the idea for this store last spring we envisioned it as a fairly simple thing, but under her guidance it’s turned into something much bigger and cooler than I’d imagined. It’s very rewarding to work with such a talented group of people.

Lastly, as a bonus for you having slogged through this entire post, I should mention that there’s currently an introductory discount of 20% available…just enter coupon code MOZILLAMERCH at checkout (more details). Happy shopping!

Fresh out of the oven, the official Firefox 3.1 logos are now available for your use and enjoyment. I should note that, although they’re currently hosted on the 3.1 wiki, they’re still subject to the various rules and conditions outlined in the Firefox logo guide (we’ll update that page with these files once 3.1 launches).

My hope is that we can start using these on all 3.1-related communications to avoid any alternate versions getting spread too widely around. If you have any questions or comments, just let me know.