If not Firefox, then what DO you work on at Mozilla then? I'm genuinely curious.
Why do you think Mozilla is using Rust so much? (See servo, pushing rust components into FF, etc) They're not exactly known for jumping onto new things...
Trying out new web technologies that are experimental doesn't count?
And to fix that, you've made your name ungoogleable. Good job!
I love design, so I'm not meaning to bash design per se, but every field has its problems. With design, it's a lack of attention to usability as a scientific, empirical, psychological, cognitive, physiological sort of issue. There's too much of a focus on cleverness and theorized or actual aesthetics over real usability.
Design sits at this funny intersection of art and science, and it seems like too often the former is emphasized over the latter.
This design is a perfect example of this, and the review reinforces it. Where's the discussion of usability and confusion? When did they reach out to naive users and pose real-world use tasks involving the logo redesign? When did the review discuss this?
The logo redesign is great unless you acknowledge that it co-opts symbols that have real meaning and can be ambiguous in that regard. Mozilla was well-intended but failed.
To me, this whole discussion is a perfect example of the foibles of the design world.
As a full-time designer who graduated from a fine arts college (read: least-user focused possible), this is completely false regarding what I and all my peers do.
Designers don't set out to be "clever" – we're not programmers, after all. We set out to solve a ritual problem of meaningfully conveying ideas and messages to a target audience, wide or narrow. The reasoning is pretty simple.
Readability (different from legibility) is an incredibly important part of designing with type, and your lede basically invalidated all else you have to say, especially as followed by "I love design."
But it was a point repeatedly made in the other threads about this redesign – basically "they're wasting their/our/my money on useless stuff like this when what they need to do is make Firefox use less memory/faster/whatever...".
"A logo that not only DOESN’T suck but one that has a strong idea, a fresh execution, a promising flexibility, and, that all of it together, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, manages to communicate what Mozilla is about."
Now if only someone would write an article explaining why considerations such as branding are useful even for non-profits...
edit: the last sentence was apparently interpreted as an actual question, when it was meant as a plea for someone to do an eloquent write-up of the non-profits-also-need-marketing case that I could link to.