The familiar swoosh-tailed Firefox logo could soon be a thing of the past.

Mozilla has announced that it is redesigning the iconic Firefox logo with input from users.

In blog post titled ‘Evolving the Firefox Brand’ Mozilla explains why it wants to drastically revamp the Firefox identity.

And the keyword seems to be “family”.

Firefox is more than a PC web browser

When people think of Firefox they tend to think of the PC web browser, and it’s for this reason Mozilla says it needs to “evolve” the brand.

Making a few tweaks to the existing icon isn’t enough: Mozilla is starting from scratch

Firefox is far more than just a web browser these days. It encompasses a growing range of tools, services and experiences across multiple platforms and devices.

The company recently released Lockbox, a password manager for iOS devices, maintains a browser for VR, and has a standalone Notes app for Android.

“As an icon, that fast fox with a flaming tail doesn’t offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family”.

Or to put it another way, Mozilla wants the icons used by its apps, add-ons, and services to share a unified look and feel, and to do that, the official Firefox logo has to change.

Simply making a few colour tweaks to the existing Firefox icon, as it did for the “Quantum” release, isn’t enough: Mozilla is starting from scratch.

So the non-profit tasked its product and brand designers with creating a set of new “design system approaches”.

You can see two of these approaches below. They are made up of a master brand icon, icons for the various products that live under it, and new icons for the desktop browser itself.

The system has to work for the all of the products Firefox has already releases, as well as for the things it is yet to create!

But nothing shown in the image above is final.

“Each individual icon will undergo several rounds of refinement, or may change entirely, between now and their respective product launches,” Mozilla’s designers say.

“Our focus at this point is on the system.”

It’s worth noting that this is still an early effort and that typography, patterns, naming, i.e. the things which make up the “total brand experience”, are in the process of being explored.

And it wants your feedback on these designs.

MOAR MOZILLA

The design of the incumbent Mozilla Firefox logo does not lend itself too well to adaptation. And, as you can see below, it hasn’t changed much for several years:

Rebranding Firefox as a family of products and not just a sole desktop PC browser isn’t an easy task, nor one that can happen overnight.

Mozilla is serious: a redesign based on one of the systems will roll out in the coming months

Mozilla stresses that it is “not crowdsourcing the answer” to the rebrand, nor asking people to vote for a winner. It simply wants feedback on the direction its designers are taking with the systems above.

That said, it is serious, stating that a redesign based on one of these design platters will “roll out” in the coming months “based on feedback, […] insights from formal user testing, and our product knowledge and design sensibilities”.

“With your input, we’ll have a final system that will make a Firefox product recognizable out in the world even if a fox is nowhere in sight,” they add.

So if you’re interested in sharing your opinion with Mozilla — and I just know that some of you will be itching to do so — you can head over to the blog post and leave a (constructive, civil and helpful) comment.

Mozilla Blog on Evolving Firefox’s Design

Big thanks Tim