As enthusiastic supporters and users of open source technology, we at silverorange are always glad to have an opportunity to contribute back to the open source projects that we benefit so much from.

Our own Creative Director, Steven Garrity, caught the attention of the open source community and of the Mozilla Foundation with his October 2003 essay on the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla applications (web browser, email client, etc.). Steven argued that the Mozilla applications needed a strong and consistent visual identity, something that has been conspicuously lacking in many open-source software projects.

Soon after the publishing of the article, Steven was contacted by Bart Decrem of the Mozilla Foundation and asked to help implement some of the suggestions made in the essay. Steven went on to assemble the Mozilla Visual Identity Team – a group of designers and user interface specialists from around the world who volunteer their time to help improve the visual identity of the Mozilla applications.

Also included on this new Mozilla Visual Identity Team, are Daniel Burka and Stephen DesRoches from silverorange.

The first major project of the visual identity team was the creation of a logo and icon set for the recently renamed Firefox web browser (formerly Mozilla Firebird). Working with Jon Hicks of Hicksdesign in Oxfordshire, U.K., the team developed a new logo and icon set for the browser. The team plans to extend the new visual identity to other Mozilla projects, including the popular Thunderbird mail applications.

Elsewhere in the open source world, silverorange’s own Nathan Fredrickson has been contributing patches to Gaim, an open-source instant messaging application. Nathan has also become the maintainer of GtkSpell, an open source library that provides in-line spell-checking for the text views in the GTK user interface.