How to Make Firefox Skins for Mozilla's Personas Gallery

by Lisa Hoover - Aug. 05, 2009Comments (1)

It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that Mozilla added the 10,000th design to its Personas gallery of Firefox browser skins. Oh, wait. It was only a few weeks ago -- May 14th, to be exact. Not bad for a project that only launched in March. This week, a mere four months after Personas opened its digital doors, there are now 20,000 different designs available for tricking out your browser's header and footer.

It's not too late to get in on the act and have your own handmade Persona added to the gallery. Mozilla's templates and explicit instructions make it dead-simple to create and submit one in a matter of minutes. How easy is it? Well, I haven't got a lick of design talent whatsoever and I was able to put one together that won't scare small children. Read on to find out how.

Download Personas from Mozilla Labs, then restart your browser to complete the installation. Right away you'll see fancy blue swirls replacing the boring gray default theme Firefox ships with.

Before you make a custom skin, you'll need to edit the image you've chose for your theme (an image that you have permission to use, of course). To make the header for my skin, I grabbed a picture of Shamu I had handy from a recent trip to SeaWorld and fashioned it into a 3000 x 200 banner with my favorite image editor (that's for the header, footers need to be 3000 x 100).

Once your image is ready, hop down to the little fox in the lower-left corner of your screen and click to bring up the Personas menu, then choose Preferences. Check the box marked, "Show Custom Person in menu", then click on the fox again. Choose Custom, then Edit, and navigate to your saved image.

Check to see if you need to make adjustments on sizing or coloring, and that's all there is to it. Once you have your skin just the way you like it, submit it to Mozilla Labs for inclusion in the gallery, and wait for your masterpiece to appear.

Obviously, my lack of artistic talent is evident in this skin I made but I'm sure OStatic readers are much better at this kind of thing than I so head over to Mozilla Labs and get to work on creating your own Persona for the gallery. When it's approved, come back here and share what you've made.