Mozilla has decided to bring a a visual refresh of the Firefox logo and product icon, which have been modernized to reflect Firefox's role in the ever-changing Web of 2013 and beyond.
Not too long ago, Firefox was a desktop browser, plain and simple. However, as the
Web has grown and developed in new ways, so has Firefox ? it?s now a browser for
Android, Mac, Windows and Linux as well as an apps marketplace and a brand new
mobile operating system.
With all that in mind, Mozilla is redesigning the logo of the popular browser.
Unlike previous versions, the updated logo was created specifically with mobile in
mind, as it's been optimized to be crisper and cleaner on small screens and lower
resolution devices. However, it also scalesnicely for use in retina displays, and
(unlike previous versions) can be accurately recreated in SVG.
The changes are not so obvious at a glance, but you can see them in the picture
below:
Mozilla's designers have tried to simmplify the logo's style without bringing it
down to basic geometric shapes and solid colors. Instead, they have chosen to
bring simplicity by better balancing color, contrast, shape, and detail. To that
last point, they removed quite a bit of detail in this latest revision but
purposely added more detail where needed to accommodate today's high resolution
screens.
The first step in the rebuild was to go in and strip out all the detail that was
using blend mode layering such as multiply, screen and overlay - mostly found in
the tail area 1. Having reduced the logo down to its shape-tweaked forms 2 and
softer gradients, Mozilla's designers continued to remove any detail they thought
wasn't critical to the overall image. This tied into another goal of having the
image hold up with greater clarity at smaller sizes.
Once they had removed a fair amount of detail in the logo, it was time to look at
introducing enhanced detail where it would be needed when scaled to larger sizes.
All the continents 3 were recreated on the globe with high resolution displays in
mind and they paired those with a removal of the high gloss 4 to create a softer,
deeper color globe. Combining these deeper blues with now lighter oranges in softer
detailed fur 5, the designers achieved that greater contrast that would create
better separation of the elements at all sizes.
A final touch that you may notice in the new logo is the arm of the fox now extends
from a shoulder instead of layering behind his chest 6.