Ditch the Dinosaur and Embrace Technology–Mozilla Couples Genius Marketing with Smack-On Design for Tremendous Rebranding Success

Mozilla’s much-publicized redesign produced a sorely-needed update to their tired T. Rex-style logo. The original design aligned closely with the company name while capitalizing on the popularity of dinosaurs in the 90s (it actually resembled the Jurassic Park logo–right down to the color choices). While an argument might be made for preserving the love of extinct creatures, the name itself did not really convey what Mozilla does, so it made sense to ditch the dinosaur from the redesign and create a new graphic identity that better embodies the company’s function, which is developing products for the internet.

Aside from the content (namely, dinosaurs), the original logo came across as a boring, lackluster illustration with some non-complementary text appended. The new wordmark, by Johnson Banks, totally nails the tech and internet focus of the brand by incorporating a URL into the logo, with “l’s” represented by forward slashes and the “i” standing in for the colon. The logo got its own complementary slab-serif-style font (Zilla by Typotheque) that harkens to Courier (a typewriter-style coding font).

Unlike most logos with dedicated or single-branded color schemes, the new Mozilla logo is designed to display in a variety of primary and secondary colors—whatever seems appropriate to the context. The radical redesign, along with their flashy, high-profile roll-out, made for a very successful rebranding.