Web Highlights: The Open Standard

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Web Highlights: The Open Standard

Web Highlights is an ongoing series showcasing some of the brightest and most useful destinations online, celebrating the imaginative minds that come together in web development to make the internet a more interesting place.

The benefits of having a recognizable brand or company mantra is that you can incorporate these familiarities when you’re developing digital products. Calling on these pieces of your company culture, visually, can also make for quite the experience if executed properly.

With that said, today’s highlight is a brand new publication from Mozilla: The Open Standard. We’ve touched on news columns before, but today’s highlight isn't just interesting because of the content type or the visual design of the website. Instead, The Open Standard is worth your attention because to its core, it represents what Mozilla is as a company. It takes on the company’s tonal cues at every corner, and incorporates the Mozilla vibe so effectively that you’d probably recognize it without any hints if you spend much time on Firefox or engaged with the community. That's a big deal for a company participating in multiple spaces.

The site focuses on five categories of content that are relevant to Mozilla’s aspirations for an open and productive web. They are live, learn, innovate, engage, and opinion. Focusing on these specifically is a great way of affirming their interests and enforcing the impression that mozillians are actively working on an open internet. It's a potentially costly focus that may lock the site out of other high-traffic news categories that are still web related, but the rewards would trump that cost if Mozilla can really drive home that they are the one-stop source for security and openness.

The soul doesn’t stop there, either. Editor in Chief of The Open Standard, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera has stated in the site’s introductory post that in the coming months the publication will open to the community, calling for collaboration in the form of content contributions, crowdsourcing the news, and calling attention to pressing, uncovered issues. In effect, The Open Standard will either become a hub for all those who follow Mozilla’s vision, or a mess of conflicting views and opinions on how journalism should function. It’s a bold move, but not unlike much of the site’s DNA, a high-risk high-reward one.

Beyond the grandiose intentions Mozilla has still taken time to polish the little things. Coloured categorization tabs make sorting through content seem smoother. Things like social media share buttons that scale in size as they’re used add that little extra bit of charm and remind users that Mozilla likes to have fun, despite the gravity of their agenda. Pixel by pixel The Open Standard feels like Mozilla, which may be great for some users, and not so great for others. The beauty of an open web is that if you fall into the latter, you can simply look elsewhere. For those actively involved in the open web movement , this is one to bookmark!

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