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.

[View with PicLens]

Visit http://www.getpersonas.com/

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.

Firefox will be releasing an API shortly that will allow developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a content window such as HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, SVG and Canvas.

So how do you get started?

*First make sure to download the Personas Extension

Designing your theme:

1. 1. You will need to Download the graphic template files. Download Here.
   Standard Personas are made up of two graphic image files, a “header” image displayed as the background of the top of the browser window (i.e. behind the toolbars and the tab strip) and a “footer” image displayed as the background of the bottom of the browser window (i.e. the status and find bars).

   The header image should be 3000 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall. The footer image should be 3000 pixels wide and 100 pixels tall.

2. 2. Open these files in any graphic editor
3. 3. Make the necessary changes
4. 4. Re-save the files as whatever_header.png and whatever_footer.png
5. 5. Your ready to test!

Here is a quick tutorial to test in manual mode:

1. 1. In the URL bar of your browser type “about:config” and hit enter.
2. 2. Search for “extensions.personas.editor” by typing it into the Filter box that appears at the top of the page.
3. 3. Double click on the line for “extensions.personas.editor”.
4. 4. In the dialog box that appears prompting you to enter a string value, enter “manual” and click on OK.
5. 5. You should now be in manual mode.
6. 6. Click on the little Fox mask icon in the lower-left corner of your browser, and you should see a “Use Local Header…” option.
7. 7. Click on the “Use Local Header…” option, and it should open up a file selector.  Select the header file for your design.
8. 8. You should now see your design in your browser.

Submitting your Persona:
To submit your persona go to http://www.getpersonas.com and click on the ‘Submit’ link in the lower right corner, you can then register an account with Firefox Personas and easily submit any time. Have fun!

Here’s my finished version (the red highlights indicate the area where the Persona is loaded). You can find it in the Personas directory under “Other”.

Fore more Info:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/personas-for-firefox
https://labs.mozilla.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=389&page=1#Item_0
http://people.mozilla.com/~cbeard/personas/designers/