Sofa's blog about design, code everything else.

Yesterday Alex Faaborg, User Experience Designer at Mozilla, posted a really nice article on our collaboration for some new icons that will be in the upcoming 3.1 release of Firefox.

Included in the post are a detailed description of the design process and almost all of the sketches and final renderings of the icons created. It's definitely worth a read.

The collaboration with Mozilla was particularly smooth and enjoyable. Alex seemed to have a very clear idea of what things were important in the whole process which, in turn, enabled us to very quickly and freely come up with some creative proposals.

Attention to detail was key to being able to achieve these results. Most importantly, we wanted to make sure that the used metaphors fit in very well with the Mac platform and had a positive connotation.

This especially applied to the Crash Reporter tool. Many of the other design proposals would leave you with the feeling something bad had happened and fixing or rescuing was needed. The final icon, however, simply uses a supportive metaphor.

The Software Update icon proves that trying a lot of obvious things and a bit of luck can lead to a great icon. We love how it's become a surprisingly fresh adaptation on the relatively stale chasing arrows idea.

It doesn't happen often that you get the opportunity to create graphics for such a high profile product. We are very proud of the results, and we hope to continue this collaboration in the future.