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A comment on Make Firefox support moz://a.

Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by datenwolf on Thursday January 19, 2017 @07:45AM (#13435293)
Until now I didn't realize Mozilla changed their logo. Now I've seen it the typographer in me cries… The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information. So either Mozilla now rebrands themself as

moz-colon-slash-slash

or they now live with a significant portion of typography-anal nerds who dislike that logo.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by roryisok on Thursday January 19, 2017 @08:12AM (#13435473)
> The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information

I don't know if its ironic that this sentence had a typo and some non-working markdown

Anyway, the purpose of text may be to unambiguously convey information, but the purpose of a logo is to look cool and be memorable

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by notheguyouthink on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:42AM (#13436120)
Fwiw, the Markdown works just fine. Hackernews doesn't support Markdown.

I'm not sure what you call this weird thing that HN does support.. but it's certainly not markdown.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by JadeNB on Thursday January 19, 2017 @06:39PM (#13440487)
> I'm not sure what you call this weird thing that HN does support.. but it's certainly not markdown.

Markaround.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by roryisok on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:43AM (#13436132)
markhalfdown? or... italics
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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by laumars on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:12AM (#13435865)
Logos fall more in the realm of graphic design rather than typography. They're an avatar thus logos don't necessarily need to be readable - albeit there is a modern trend to use the company name in an interesting typeface as their logo. However there are plenty of examples where a company logo contains no text what-so-ever - including Mozilla's previous logo[1]. So I wouldn't get too hung up on its typographic design. At least not unless Mozilla start using 'Moz://a' in normal correspondence. ;)

Personally I quite like it. It's memorable and well suited to the business they're best known for. Which is essentially the crux of a logo.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Mozilla_...)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by 38kkdiu on Thursday January 19, 2017 @01:31PM (#13438158)
The problem is that there's nothing unambiguously non-typographic about the design. If they had distorted the symbols so much that they were outside the realm of normal unicode characters, sure. But anyone with that font could reconstruct the logo.

Stuff like this works when the glyphs are recognizable enough, but when the design is such that you simultaneously know that it is not to be interpreted literally. It fails here because the latter isn't clear.

So in this case it is typography. That's the problem.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by bisby on Thursday January 19, 2017 @10:56AM (#13436739)
You dont remember when people got confused and always called Mozilla 'red dinosaur head' because the logo was confusing?
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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by pbhjpbhj on Thursday January 19, 2017 @05:32PM (#13440086)
This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name, they serve different purposes. Consider Indesit, they style their name but have a useful logo that can stand alone.

Mozilla could do with an actual logo, something that fits with the Thunderbird & Firefox logos.

Edit: Having looked at the other designs I think they chose correctly, but perhaps needed a "none of the above" option. This https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/#co... gets closer.

Perhaps they wanted something that worked just using text, I guess. Maybe 2017 will be the year of leet-speak on the desktop!?!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by toyg on Thursday January 19, 2017 @08:11PM (#13440972)
> This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name

Pretty much all the material about the redesign says this is, in fact, a logo.

I agree that the whole process was a complete clusterfuck. They picked the less atrocious suggestion. It's still terrible.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by gkya on Thursday January 19, 2017 @10:17AM (#13436385)
> The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information.

The purpose of text is to convey information, ambiguously or not. Text is a coherent and cohesive group of one or more sentences. A logo is not text, it is a graphic that represents an establishment or a brand. It may include some text, but it is as text as a photo of a road sign with some text on it is.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by datenwolf on Sunday January 22, 2017 @01:06PM (#13456280)
> Text is a coherent and cohesive group of one or more sentences

That would be prose¹ (and to some degree poetry).

Text² is an object that can be read. And by that definition…

> A logo is not text

… yes, a logo can be text.

----

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_(literary_theory)

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by gkya on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @03:24AM (#13479714)
Read better into your wikipedia articles. This is how your #2 continues:

> It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by TorKlingberg on Thursday January 19, 2017 @08:19AM (#13435514)
There's been several front page articles about it over the last few days. It's a perfect bike shedding topic.
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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by minikites on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:24AM (#13436973)
>The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information.

I have a pile of novels (e.g. Faulkner, Philip K. Dick) that argue against this very narrow view of text.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by matt4077 on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:48AM (#13436159)
Well maybe those self-proclaimed typography nerds could take this moment to collectively wonder how all these thousands of companies using fonts other than Helvetica could have fallen for amateurs telling them that fonts could convey emotions, that ambiguity could be artful, that art could have value, or that branding could shape perception.

I mean that one guy named his company "Virgin". How ambiguous is that? He'll have a learn a lot of things. And did you hear about the guys using an emoticon as their logo? Of like a fruit or something?

Good thing marketing doesn't work on me, or anybody else for that matter.

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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by praisewhitey on Thursday January 19, 2017 @12:05PM (#13437327)
You must hate calligraphy.
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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by db48x on Thursday January 19, 2017 @04:38PM (#13439713)
You're not going to like the curl logo either, then.
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Re:Make Firefox support moz://a by pbhjpbhj on Thursday January 19, 2017 @05:36PM (#13440118)
They go together really poorly. If Moz://a is the Mozilla logo then presumably Curl:// is the Curlill logo ... which it isn't, they follow different paradigms.
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