Firefox browser UI artwork released

Designer Stephen Horlander and I are pleased to announce the availability of the toolbar and UI artwork seen in Firefox on Windows and Mac OS X.

Winstripe has been the default theme on the Windows version of Firefox for over two years. Man, how time flies. To explain the odd name, the Pinstripe project started in 2001 as an attempt to make the appearance of the Mozilla Suite fit in with the Mac OS X desktop. Icon designer Stephen Horlander joined the project and took the icon artwork to a new level of usability and polish. The Windows version of Pinstripe, dubbed “Winstripe”, became the default look on the Windows version of Firefox 0.9.

I’d like to see you take the artwork and remix it, mash it up with your own projects, use the artwork as the basis for your own Firefox themes. If you’re not familiar with Firefox themeing, start with the documentation at the Mozilla Dev Center. There’s an active community over at the Mozillazine Themes forum that’ll help you get up to speed. If creating a theme for Firefox looks daunting but you have a great idea, create a mockup of your idea and share it on the Themes forum. You might find people to help you turn your idea into a real theme. Enjoy!

Download Details

The artwork source zips contain Illustrator and Photoshop files. The majority of the icons were created by Stephen Horlander with contributions by Kevin Gerich. You can use, modify and distribute them under the Mozilla tri-license.

Pinstripe Browser Art (3.6MB)

Winstripe Browser Art (5.9MB)

Thunderbird's Extreme Mac-over

Thunderbird theme before and after

After the Pinstripe theme landed in Firebird, icon designer Stephen Horlander and I dove in to a companion Thunderbird theme. We started in early November 2003 and finally hit the “let’s stop fiddling with it and get it out there” phase in March of 2004. I’ve gone through the messages that Stephen and I exchanged during that time and pulled out a few examples of design decisions.
Continue reading “Thunderbird's Extreme Mac-over”

Mac Firefox Icon Update

I just checked in new revisions of the back, forward, reload and stop icons for Mac Firefox by icon wizard Stephen Horlander. These new buttons attempt to address the critics of the previous set, and they share their shapes with the Windows Firefox theme. We went with a more colorful toolbar this time instead of making the nav icons all blue. This will probably be the final major change before Firefox 1.0 is released.

newernavicons.png

[ Update: Download the latest Firefox nightly build to see the new icons ]

The Browser, Redesigned: Take Two (or 0.2)

 
winstripe 0.2 toolbar

[ This post is by Stephen Horlander, the designer behind the majority of the Firefox icons. – Kevin ]

After the release of “Winstripe” into the wild there was a large and varied response. Ranging from mindless petulant rants and demands, to well thought out critiques. Lets just say there were more of the former than the latter. Even before it’s inclusion in Firefox I was personally less than thrilled about how it turned out. The idea, as you may have read, was to take the icons from Pinstripe and make them fit into a Windows environment. The theory was sound as the icon concepts used in Pinstripe were, I feel, fairly strong. Due to time constraints and my own admittedly limited familiarity with more recent incarnations of Windows I think they failed on this count. They do however work well enough and are a good deal better than most of the icons used by many Windows applications, in my biased opinion anyway : )

Continue reading “The Browser, Redesigned: Take Two (or 0.2)”