During a Mozilla Labs week a while back, I was tasked with creating a logo for a yet to be realized project that centered around a person’s contacts.  That initial experiment has matured into a full Labs project and is now up and running as Mozilla Labs Contacts, so head on over and check it out.

When it comes to the actual logo, whatever possessed me to try and illustrate a field of undulating light in vector is beyond me.  I may have been mad at myself for not grabbing a cup of coffee that morning, or perhaps I was keen on having a headache that day.  Either way, it happened – so I thought I’d share the process.

First order of business, I illustrated the address book.  A fairly straight forward illustration – gradients and strips of color forming the volume of the pages and cover.  As always, applying more than one gradient to a shape using the Appearance panel within Illustrator is key to getting volume, ambient light and shadows looking the way you want.  Layering colors and gradients using different transparency effects is the greatest technique for building anything in vector.

Now comes the fun part – projected holographic light!  Of course, the line “Help me Obi Wan..” popped into my head as soon as I started and stuck as the main inspiration for the visual.  The first step was to create a human shape on a similar 3/4 plane as the book.  I hunted around for an inspirational image and found a nice classic bust sculpture at the proper angle.  The next task was illustrating it with high contrast light and shadow outlines to allow a”pass through” look for the 3D light form.  A bottom up radial gradient gave the illusion of a light source originating from the book which I then augmented with another full outline of the shape including the beam itself.  Adding a “Stylize > Feather” effect to the vector shape gave it a nice transparent gaseous look and completed the form.  Of course, the whole technology of projected holograms is not yet perfected, so I had to create an overlay gradient of wavy lines to convey signal frequency issues.  All the needed elements were now complete.  Put them together and what have you got?  Bippity boppity boo in most cases, but in this case a somewhat believable hologram.

At some point I may create a video showing the techniques used in the creation of one of my logos.  I’ll be sure to see what I can whip up in the form of an instructional video when I can find the time.  *presses the laugh track button*  Seriously, though, I’ll see what I can come up with.

Playing around with -moz-radial-gradient this past while, and seeing the amazing job done on the CSS Opera logo by David Desandro, I thought I’d have a go at recreating one of the logos I illustrated within the past year using pure CSS.

The Raindrop logo I created was the prime candidate, as my first thoughts were “hey, three of the corners are basically -moz-border-radius set to 100%!”  Done.

Next was to figure out how to construct it. Well, turns out I made myself a cheat sheet shortly after I designed the logo, highlighting the gradient elements I layered within the shape using the appearance palette:

Using the separate elements as a guide, I built out the shapes and gradients checking the rgb settings and their gradient percentage positioning in Illustrator.  Turns out, it translates pretty well.  Only a few tweaks here and there.

In the end, it isn’t perfect, but pretty close for a half hour test.  If I can sort out using ellipse gradients vs circles, I should be able to make it much closer to the original image.

Have a look at the result here and be sure to use zoom in the browser to see it scale!

Note: I did this as a quick test using only -moz CSS rules. At some point I will try and get this working across all browsers that use border radius and gradients.

I’m going to talk to you about a website!  The Mozilla Labs website, now with a fresh new coat of paint! *throws up arms in rejoicing fashion*  Today, we’ve launched the new theme for the Mozilla Labs site and our project pages.  Wider articles, bigger pictures, in-your-face headlines, it has it all.  Need to know what the author of an article looks like?  We’ve got that too!  And diagonal lines… did I mention diagonal lines?  We’re swimming in them.

Please head on over and look around.  We’ll be evolving the site further in the weeks and months ahead, adding newer navigation and expanded project descriptions, so stay tuned.  Please feel free to give me your feedback and if you find anything that may need fixing, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

There’s one more thing…

For those of you who now demand nothing but diagonal line artwork, I have created a fresh new Persona to usher in the launch.  Feel free to gird your browser with the Mozilla Labs Refresh persona, now live at getpersonas.com – http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/87345 !

Enjoy!

About Drumbeat

Mozilla Drumbeat is global community of people creating tools that enable internet users to understand, participate and take control of their online lives. Drumbeat provides an opportunity for these people to share project ideas — and finds contributors, funds and advice to help the most promising projects succeed. Mozilla also directly leads a number of Drumbeat projects of its own. https://wiki.mozilla.org/drumbeat

About Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. http://getfirebug.com/

Initial Inspiration

To me, and quite likely to most of you out there, a subject such as a space station can drum up lots of imagery.  We’re bombarded with Sci-Fi constantly and we get to see lots of space vessels and stations in all the glowy, shiny bits of Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica moving picture shows.  Now those are all excellent sources for inspiration, but my mind decided to travel into the deep recesses of my brain to two excellent sources from my childhood – Calvin and Hobbes’ Spaceman Spiff and Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon.

With Spaceman Spiff, we have an example of space vehicle design at its simplest, and in my mind, the perfect look for a ship in the logo.  It’s a classic UFO saucer style, full glass dome and all.  I have the entire Calvin and Hobbes collection in hardcover and I couldn’t let this opportunity to draw inspiration from my favorite childhood comic pass me by.  DEATH TO NAGOONS!  Done.

Now when thinking about the design of the space station itself, my mind went straight to Monolith Burger from Space Quest 3.  I spent many an hour trying to land Astro Chicken on the pads in the arcade mini-game found within its pressurized walls.  The interstellar diner is apparently now firmly etched within my brain.  This game still holds steady as one of my top five games of all time.  The Two Guys from Andromeda were geniuses and it was a sad day when Ken and Roberta Williams handed over the reigns of Sierra.  But I digress.  Achievement unlocked: Space station inspiration. On to the sketches.

A Few Quick Sketches

Having gathered my sketching markers and moleskin, I began sketching out some station designs.  As much fun as it is to use a Wacom Cintiq, nothing beats sketching in a moleskin with a graphic pen. There is no undo and if you make a mistake, most times you can turn that mistake into a new feature you hadn’t planned.  Happy accidents.

Final Logo Design

In the end, I’m happy with how the logo turned out.  It took 5 hours total once I started illustrating it with vector.  I kept the palette the same as the Add-ons logo and went with more of a brass look to the station instead of a standard greenish-grey “space metal” look.  If you look closely, the inhabitants of the station are wee Mozillians that are either planning for Browser Wars or forming a song list for the inevitable Karaoke marathon that occurs in every space station.  Be prepared for their next move.

Yes, that’s right, the Mozilla Creative Collective is up and running and we want you to join!  Why you say?  Well, did you know that there are achievement badges and design challenges?  Did you know you can create your own gallery for others to view and comment on?  Did you know you can do all of this for the low, low price of FREE?  That’s right folks. It’s your one-stop-shop for flexing your creative muscle and showing the Mozilla community your mad, mad skills.

Did I mention achievement badges?

…

About the Mozilla Creative Collective

The Creative Collective is a community of artists and designers inspired by the Mozilla ideals of openness, innovation and participation.

We believe in the power of well-made and widely distributed art, and want to make it possible for artists to cover the web with designs inspired by Mozilla and the principles we stand for. We also want to showcase the talents of our members by giving them the opportunity to share their work with a global audience.

To do this, we’ve created an online social environment where designers and non-designers alike can connect and collaborate in a positive, communal manner. Where things go from here is up to you, but we’re looking forward to seeing what happens!

When it comes to creating Personas for Firefox, most people don’t realize a wee little fun fact about the creation process.  If you create a few different frames at the proper dimensions for both the header and the footer, you can piece them together as an aPNG (the example Persona below has a description that says animated GIF, which will work locally for testing, but only aPNGs are accepted at getpersonas.com).  A handy add-on to use for the process is aPNG Edit, found at addons.mozilla.org.

Test out your creation using the “Custom Persona” preference, make sure it looks good to go, submit it to getpersonas.com, and congratulations – you’ve just made an animated skin for your browser!

To see one in action, pop on over to my gallery and see the animated cloud example I recently posted. It is a quick little example, so feel free to better me and make some amazing (stick to the subtle side, no insane blinking please) background animations for Firefox!

I await your creative responses!

With the launch of Firefox 3.5 today, I’m excited to post an all new wallpaper to commemorate the event!

Within the web today, a browsing transformation is underway.  We’re seeing constant advancement from the static browsing Middle Ages of old and the ushering in of a new Modern Era of openness, speed and security.

Taking advantage of all the glorious advancements this new era has to offer has never been easier with the newly relased Firefox 3.5!

To add to the excitement, when a person decides to upgrade to the speediest, safest and most advanced Firefox yet, it is best to update your desktop wallpaper to show your love for the browser.  Why not download a freshly baked Firefox 3.5 wallpaper?  Our wallpaper is rich in pixels and has 100% of your daily visual intake of Firefox fun.

A big shout out to the team of Alex Faaborg, Jennifer Boriss, Alexander Limi and John Slater for the idea and feedback!

Now, go get one now!

(Update: Now get this wallpaper as a Firefox Persona skin!)

download the widescreen version

download the fullscreen version

and your clicks for free.

Last Friday I decided to have a go at teaching myself After Effects.  I’ve been wanting to test the waters of motion graphics for a while and decided to take the plunge.  A few hours later I had the startings of a fun intro video I’ve been wanting to create for some time now.  It’s no where near complete as I want to inject whimsy and merriment to a higher degree, but it’s a start.

Exporting the video to Quicktime, it weighed in at a hefty 250Mb at 1280 x 720.  Ouch.

So what did I do?  I gave the OGG format a whirl.  An open video standard with dead simple <video> code bits to slap ‘er into a page?  Sure!  Sign me up.

The result was the 1280 x 720 250Mb Quicktime turning into a 1280 x 720 1.5 Mb OGG file.  Now I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty fantastic to me.

Here is the result for your viewing pleasure (Firefox 3.5 beta required to view).

Enjoy!

note: I’m sure my lack of knowledge about video codecs and compression may be showing in regards to the file sizes, but hey, I’m just starting out in the moving picture scene.

Designing UI elements for a mobile browser has taught me a great deal when it comes to creating interactive graphical elements that are to be used in a very small space.  Of course, when I say small space, I mean a small space that has the potential to be different for each handset out there.  Not only are we talking resolution differences, but the screen DPI can change from device to device as well.

So after resizing and re-slicing the Fennec UI for the second time, I quickly realized that this could be a full-time job for a team of designers depending on the list of handsets Fennec will be appearing on.

Hold the phone…  whats this?  Firefox 3.5 enables a new slew of fun CSS3 design styles eh? Rounded edges eh?  Embedded fonts eh?

* gears turning, monkeys typing, hamsters running *

What if we could replace almost all of the graphical UI elements within Fennec with CSS created equivalents?  As a designer, am I comfortable bypassing Photoshop and letting CSS run the pixel rodeo?  After a few initial tests, the answer to both of those questions was a very solid “yes”.  A solid “friggin’ right” if in Cape Breton.

DISCLAIMER: These design tests are done to see how close we can get CSS to replicate rasterized images. The elements you will see here may or may not appear in any Fennec builds.

Toggles and Options

The first challenge was creating “on/off” toggles for the preferences pane within Fennec.  Doing some quick research into what could be done with CSS3 in Firefox 3.5, the ultimate arsenal was discovered: the -moz-border-radius, -moz-border-color, @font-face, and opacity styles.

Glorious CSS3 comes to the mobile UI rescue!

As you can see, the resulting UI is super crisp.  There are zero graphics involved in any of these toggles.  Here is an example of the code for the first “on/off” set:

.toggleONleft {
font-family: ‘DroidSans-Bold’;
text-transform:uppercase;
padding: 0px 8px 0px 12px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 0.5em;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 0.5em;
border-top: 4px solid #aaa;
border-left: 4px solid #ccc;
border-right: 4px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 4px solid #ccc;
-moz-border-top-colors:#aaa #bbb #ccc #ddd;
-moz-border-left-colors:#aaa #bbb #ccc #ddd;
-moz-border-bottom-colors:#aaa #bbb #ccc #ddd;
-moz-border-right-colors:#aaa #bbb #ccc #ddd;
background-color: #ddd;
display: inline;
}

.toggleOFFright {
font-family: ‘DroidSans-Bold’;
text-transform:uppercase;
color:#414141;
padding: 0px 12px 0px 8px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: 0.5em;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 0.5em;
border-top: 4px solid #ccc;
border-left: 4px solid #ccc;
border-right: 4px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 4px solid #aaa;
-moz-border-top-colors:#aaa #fff #fff #fff;
-moz-border-right-colors:#aaa #dedede #efefef #fafafa;
-moz-border-left-colors:#aaa #dedede #efefef #fafafa;
-moz-border-bottom-colors:#aaa #dedede #efefef #fafafa;
background-color: #fff;
display: inline;
}

Dark Toggles

The dark toggles really give off a 3D effect

Dark toggles were very simple to create now that the above CSS was already written.  It was just a matter of setting the fill colors, border radius, and gradient border colors.  Resizing these for different resolutions takes minutes of hex color and margin/padding tweaks!  That’s it.

Buttons

The only graphical element of the buttons is now the center glyph!

Next was the challenge of seeing how close we could get to matching the mockups I created a while back.  Turns out, pretty close indeed.  Having to use an image for only the glyph in the middle makes button creation much, much easier.

.button {
padding: 8px 4px;
font-family: ‘DroidSans-Bold’;
color:#fff;
width: 24px;
-moz-border-radius: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-radius: 0.5em;
border-top: 4px solid #ccc;
border-left: 4px solid #ccc;
border-right: 4px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 4px solid #aaa;
-moz-border-top-colors:#3b3b3b #6d6d6d #535353 #494949;
-moz-border-right-colors:#2d2d2d #484848 #484848 #414141;
-moz-border-left-colors:#2d2d2d #484848 #484848 #414141;
-moz-border-bottom-colors:#111111 #484848 #484848 #414141;
background: #414141 url(‘buttonBg.png’) repeat-x top center;
display: inline;
}

.buttonDisabled {
padding: 8px 4px;
font-family: ‘DroidSans-Bold’;
color:#999;
width: 24px;
-moz-border-radius: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-radius: 0.5em;
border-top: 4px solid #ccc;
border-left: 4px solid #ccc;
border-right: 4px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 4px solid #aaa;
-moz-border-top-colors:#3b3b3b #6d6d6d #535353 #494949;
-moz-border-right-colors:#3b3b3b #484848 #484848 #414141;
-moz-border-left-colors:#3b3b3b #484848 #484848 #414141;
-moz-border-bottom-colors:#2d2d2d #484848 #484848 #414141;
background: #414141 url(‘buttonBg.png’) repeat-x top center;
display: inline;
}

.buttonPressed {
padding: 4px 0px;
font-family: ‘DroidSans-Bold’;
color:#fff;
width: 24px;
-moz-border-radius: 0.5em;
-webkit-border-radius: 0.5em;
border-top: 8px solid #ccc;
border-left: 8px solid #ccc;
border-right: 8px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 9px solid #aaa;
-moz-border-top-colors:#323232 #111111 #111111 #1f1f1f #272727 #2a2a2a #2c2c2c #2d2d2d;
-moz-border-right-colors:#323232 #111111 #1f1f1f #272727 #292929 #2a2a2a #2c2c2c #2d2d2d;
-moz-border-left-colors:#323232 #111111 #1f1f1f #272727 #292929 #2a2a2a #2c2c2c #2d2d2d;
-moz-border-bottom-colors:#515151 #111111 #1f1f1f #272727 #292929 #2a2a2a #2c2c2c #2d2d2d;
background-color: #2d2d2d;
display: inline;
}

Address Bar

The focus moving forward will be the address bar.  Copy and pasting code used in the above elements, playing around with padding and border radius, a fairly close representation can be made.  An example of the first pass:

I've started recreating the address bar using only CSS3 and glyphs

Now that I’ve shown you all of these examples (I’ve used images here so everyone can see the results), go check out everything on the demo pages.  For some added fun, zoom in and out within Firefox to see the UI scale!

DISCLAIMER (again): None of the elements on the demo page are interactive as this is just a CSS test for visual design only.

These are all design challenges that Firefox 3.5 has enabled me to solve.  I’m very excited to see what designers can create using all the new CSS3 styles and feel free to examine the screen.css file on the demo page to nab the code previewed here.

Go design happy and give it a whirl, but remember, you need the latest Firefox to join in on the fun!