RIP

Posted Dec 5, 2024 19:46 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: Mozilla's new branding strategy

In my experience: rebranding is often the "second envelope" that the new management tries to do. And it usually ends badly. And as expected, the new brand is strange. What is that letter on the right? Greek beta? Inverted sigma? WTF?

For those who don't know, the joke is this:

A government official is retiring, and he tells his successor: "I left you three envelopes in the desk drawer. Open them one-by-one at the time of the great need".

Time passes, a crisis comes, and the successor opens the first envelope. It says: "Blame me". So he blames the retired predecessor, and for a time everything works fine.

Then another crisis comes, and he opens the second envelope. This time it's: "Start reorganization/reforms". And this indeed helps for a while.

And then eventually the time comes for the third envelope. So he opens it. And the advice is: "Prepare three envelopes".

RIP

Posted Dec 5, 2024 19:53 UTC (Thu) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

> What is that letter on the right?

It looks like a flag detaching from a pole. It describes the state Mozilla in _precisely_.

RIP

Posted Dec 5, 2024 22:34 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

> What is that letter on the right?

It's not meant to be a letter - it's a logo that incorporates an M and represents a flag, and also represents the neck and head of a godzilla if you squint a bit, which is cute. More interesting and distinctive than the black-and-white "m" or "moz://a" they used before, and more readable as an icon than the detailed godzilla-head they used before that.

I like that more than the font, which I feel is hard to read because the descenders are far too short (especially on the 'p' - it looks much too similar to an 'o'). That's mainly a problem in the sample on the blog post, though - the versions used on https://www.mozilla.org/ look almost okay to me.

RIP

Posted Dec 5, 2024 22:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's not meant to be a letter - it's a logo that incorporates an M and represents a flag

I can see the 90-degree rotated "M" now that you pointed it, but I certainly don't see a lizard. On the other hand, if you look at the black part of the logo, it looks like a mad screaming duck.

I honestly can't see how they could have managed a worse logo. At least they haven't touched the Firefox logo.

RIP

Posted Dec 5, 2024 23:11 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> I certainly don't see a lizard. On the other hand, if you look at the black part of the logo, it looks like a mad screaming duck.

It sounds like you do see it - ducks are dinosaurs, closely related to T. rex (both being theropods), and Mozilla has traditionally used a T. rex interpretation of Godzilla, so they're pretty much the same animal. Just imagine the duck is _really_ mad, and about 100m tall, and radioactive.

RIP

Posted Dec 8, 2024 13:42 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> moz://a

I'm a little surprised that this didn't occur to me before now (and as is so often the case, now is too late to be of use(!)) but it would have been cool to use that as the "scheme" part of the address for settings etc. instead of "chrome://" or "about:/"

A nice subtle joke for a random few nerds who'd spot the reference :-P