From Developer Tools to Berlin by way of a desktop background

Hi

As some may be aware, I like creating desktop backgrounds using the developer tools in Firefox. I saw this video on the Nightly blog a couple of years ago and followed the instructions carefully and with a little trial and error, created a great image. I have since made quite a few more that have been published here.

I know that I am no artist and that the real creative effort has gone into make the original image, but it is a great way to use the Inspector and Creative Design Mode developer tools and to come away with something you can keep and/or share with friends. It is also a great advert for the power of Firefox and (for those giving Mozilla related presentations) can keep your desktop supporting the brand.

Recently Mozilla has started a new marketing campaign in Berlin. It is bold and dynamic with great imagery. From the official site, I made this. I really liked it - it came out better than I had hoped - and thought it might be useful for the Marketing team behind the campaign so I forwarded the person leading the campaign a copy. They liked it and further to them working with their designer, a more complete set of images from the campaign were produced that you can download from here.

Whilst my German language skills are not great, I really like the bold designs used in this campaign. Although I am not 100% certain I triggered these official desktop backgrounds being made, I like to think that I at least helped start the ball rolling.

So much about how we contribute to Mozilla is about the products, but there are so many other ways outside of Firefox that people can bring their skills to and add value to. If you have an idea, think about it carefully and try to think of all the ways that it could be a bad idea. If in a couple of days it still feels right, do a little work on it and see where it goes - you never quite know where it might end up.

Thanks for sharing your experience by writing this article, and also for collecting some amazing resources together in one place @plwt . I’ve put them all together in a folder and getting an app called Variety to change the wallpaper each day on my Arch Linux laptop.