Creative Brief for the new Firefox icon

I never thought the firefox icon was a particularly good brand. Right now everyone has gotten used to it, but as a brand symbol, it means nothing unless you look at it in a large format, which is exactly the opposite of the way most people use it.

If I look at the icons in my quick start list, far superior to the firefox icon are: Skype, Utorrent, FileZilla, Winamp, Eclipse, even iTunes.

Firefox looks like an orange circle on a blue circle. It's not a strong visual identity - it's recognizable now because most people know it, but on its own, it's poor.

For example, how would you describe it? Internet Explorer is 'The Blue E'. Firefox is 'The orange circular kind of thing thing with some blue dots in the middle'. If you say click on the 'Fox wrapped around a planet', your grandma will not find the icon.

Alex Faaborg has posted the first draft of the new icon:

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2009/05/15/new-firefox-icon-...

Apparently successive revisions will follow every 24 hours. I like the way they’re keeping the redesign process in the open!

Seems like they're missing the forest for the trees. The Firefox logo could use a re-branding to be more recognizable, not have an animal showing you its back, and also to overcome negative bias in Asia (Foxes are considered Tricky - not clever).