Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin is leaving Mozilla, nearly two years after they acquired his talents. It was then he sold Humanized, a project he started in our own adopted hometown of Chicago. Moving on to yet another initiative called Massive Health, this one looks to be a hefty departure from other things Raskin has worked on.

Massive Health is an effort to enable people to take control of their health, specifically around heart disease, diabetes and weight-related problems.  It’s a big task to take on, but for Raskin, the bigger the better.

He’s partnering with Sutha Kamal, Massive Health’s co-founder.  Joining the team is another Mozilla vet, Atul Varma, who served as the CTO at Huanized.  Massive Health won’t be the first health-related project to land on the web, and their angle on current health issues is something that’s been addressed time and again, for various industry-related startups seeking traction through a web presence.

But if you know anything about Raskin, you’ll know that he’s already got a few ideas for implementing Massive Health in a way that enables the user experience, with practicality at its core.  “Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties,” Raskin tells me.

So when I heard about Raskin’s departure from Mozilla I was a little surprised, but not all taken aback.  Raskin has a penchant for new ventures, exploring them at will, and seems to get a kick out of putting his own unique stamp on things.  His first name, for example, has made for plenty of playfully enhanced email signature lines based on the simplicity of the three letters, their alphabetical order, and geometric significance.

Such pragmatism is inherent for Raskin, and it shows in everything he does.  I enjoyed regular updates from his work at Mozilla, especially some of the more recent designs for browser usability.  TabCandy was one of my favorites, showing the promise behind a mere update to a product millions of people already use on a daily basis.

Now, applying this to the personal health sector will be a new challenge for Raskin and his team, but it centers around a desire to help people think about their own health as something they own, control and comprehend.  “Managing your health is difficult because there are so many variables and things of which to keep track,” Raskin goes on. “To become healthy it is critical to make it simple and understandable. After all, making health easy—understanding your body—is an interface challenge.”