Firefox Personas – Re-visited
Apr 17, 2009
A few months ago I posted about Firefox Personas and how to make your own…Here’s a quick recap:
What are Personas? Personas for Firefox is a extension that adds lightweight theming to your browser. Personas is a very simple way for any designer, beginner or advanced, to easily create themes for your browser on the fly.
Once installed, the Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. All changes to the browser chrome are applied instantly, with no need to restart.
Read the tutorial here http://dropthedigibomb.com/category/open-source-design/page/2/
Since my last post the persona community has grown and many new features have been added including chrome integration, and a gallery of over 500 persona designs. For more information on new features and latest updates check out the Personas project page http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/firefox-personas/.
In an effort to create more awareness around the Personas project, and after some discussion with developers on this project, I decided to incorporate Personas into my curriculum at Seneca College. I asked my second semester students in the Digital Media Arts Program to produce custom Personas for any category they wanted. I hope to continue adding to this collection every semester…maybe Mozilla will add a student category to the Persona gallery? 
Here are the current submissions in no particular order.
I really like the themes. This was a great idea to incorporate something like this into the curriculum. I’ll definitely try to spruce up my browser because I’m getting bored of the default.