This is a shining example of a design team that has no idea who their customers are or what's important to them.

What makes (made?) Dropbox great is it's simplicity and ease of use. Trendy fonts and Warhol colour palettes don't matter to anyone who uses Dropbox every day and don't communicate the principles of what makes its design great. I would argue that they may even get in the way of using a product like Dropbox. This feels like it was made by an agency for Kanye West rather than a serious interface design team. It doesn't even work in Safari for macOS.

I'm pretty surprised to see this as the front page manifesto for what Dropbox's team thinks great design is.

This is horrible.

How can a brand that got soooo much right get this soooo wrong?

I think we have a strong contender for worst rebrand/redesign of the year.

259 fonts! Two. Hundred. And. Fifty. Nine!

That doesn’t demonstrate diversity. It demonstrates a lack of direction.

As sad/weird/melodramatic as this may sound; I’ve never felt so angry about a rebrand before. I feel betrayed.

Nope.

They fundamentally misunderstand their users. They at once say this:

Most of these folks tell us they feel overwhelmed and distracted during the workday, and that this is one of the biggest barriers to creating work they’re proud of. They deal with cluttered inboxes, devices that ping them constantly, and processes that force them to switch between tools all day.

And then create a system that is all focused on constantly changing elements, being cluttered with color variations that scream for attention, making an overwhelming experience. Literally the opposite for what their users said.

https://imgur.com/KTvd6tU

I think Dropbox forgot that they're a file sharing system, not a fancy streetwear clothing brand.

What if we, as outsiders, don’t fully understand their problems, or goals, as a business, and this is a good solution? What if Dropbox doesn’t want to just be the invisible/passive data storage service for a bunch of tech companies and startups?

Not sure I like the direction they're going. Their previous design felt light and un-opinionated — an empty canvas where my files find a home. The new direction seems very opinionated and fashionable. Curios to see if they redo their Dashboard / File Browser as well.

Also, curious on how they calculate font sizes on that landing page:

font-size: calc(40px + 31 * ((100vw - 375px) / 1065));

Times I remembered Dropbox doing things to their brand (for the same reason):

1. Today
2. https://twitter.com/Dropbox/status/809089934501945344

Has anyone tried scrolling through this on an iPad? Holy shit.

Just want to give massive kudos to the Dropbox design team for taking this direction, and for being so g'damn bold about their work. Wow — nothing held back here.

I don't see this as designers wanking around trying to do cool digital art pieces, but I'm actually observing (astonishingly) a really large company that is willing to give their designers autonomy to execute on something that they probably knew was going to cause a stir. Drew & co probably knew that this was going to ruffle some designer feathers, which lets be honest, only the people on DN have.

I hope to see more brands taking bold steps with their visual identity in this way in an effort to reinvent themselves.

I've been looking at this this morning. It's weird, I like some of the parts... I like the new mark, I like the new type (Sharp Grotesk is a staggeringly comprehensive & immaculate family of fonts) in general... but all together it's used in an oddly zeitgeisty type of way. Stretched type is a fad, the palette is frenetic, and the general focus is drifting. I thought of Dropbox as a workhouse solution for file storage, with the premium tier focusing on enterprise. This is lifestyle branding, and I don't think it suits a company like Dropbox at all.

Edit: According to Collins' website the UI/product design looks relatively nice.

This is what their whole site should look like: https://www.dropbox.com/branding

A system that scales: Meeting people where they are

like a church? or a therapist?

Color can go from a standard Dropbox blue to “whoa.”

Yes, yes they certainly can.

259 fonts

lol

Our co-creation collages are a visual metaphor for this optimistic view of creating work together

Buzzwords yay!

Our new system juxtaposes color pairs in bold, unexpected ways

Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.

You guys know a lot of what design is comes down to how it feels.

This feels wrong, wrong for the users, wrong for the brand and just plain wrong.

brutalism yo

We’ve been busy making imagery with some fantastic artists

Uhhh, why?

cringes

It’s like Bloomberg and Spotify got together and had a Jazzercise baby.

Poor Man’s Pentagram

This already seems two years too late.

The main thing, there seems to be zero rhyme or reason behind the redesign to support the why.

You all catch this:

Our users run the gamut from business professionals to scientists and creative types. Most of these folks tell us they feel overwhelmed and distracted during the workday, and that this is one of the biggest barriers to creating work they’re proud of. They deal with cluttered inboxes, devices that ping them constantly, and processes that force them to switch between tools all day.

Our modern way of working saps their energy and keeps them from the things that matter. We want to change this, by building products and a brand that help people focus on meaningful work..

Great, so you heard what they said, know who they are, know their challenges and completely disregarded them in order to stuff your opinion down their throats.

And, are now overwhelming users with even more cognitive demands with an opinionated brand and this cliche notion of creativity that gets in the way of understanding and using the product.

This feels childish and not like a safe and secure business tool I can forward to a colleague.

I know people don't usually like changes and all that *bs, but this is a bold move in the wrong direction from a company I've referenced when discussing about clean work.

The color palette is HORRIBLE and hope it doesn't affect the UI. I guess the new trend is to make things... ugly?

P.s: I don't really care about the brand because it should be invisible on a platform that stores our content.

Really curious about how will this play out for them.

Warns you in the guidelines about not filling the logo with anything, but they provide a gazillion of color combinations (me no understand)

I liked the crocodile attached to the balloon.

I'll give it that.

This design gives me confidence.

Great branding for a quiet boring and -dead company. The aim is not to please current users but to find new ones.

What the hell? That sh|t is fugly. Landing page colors ... :D The fonts ...

this is dreadful. What even. I first thought this was a April Fools Joke. Yet its October. What the hell is going on

Credit to Dropbox for breaking away from the light and breezy illustration style that's now ubiquitous and overdone, in such a ballsy way.

Dropbox outsourced the rebranding to Collins. The new brand makes sense in the context of that studio's body of work: https://www.wearecollins.com

Collins work is old fashioned. Reinterpreting trends from the past is fine, but to my eye it's more regurgitation than reinterpretation.

When Dropbox introduced their illustration style it was refreshing and fun to watch it evolve over time. It was so good that it was imitated to the point where they felt they needed to throw it away and start over again, looking for the 'new' thing.

I don't think Dropbox is going to be the brand that introduces that 'new' thing this time around.

I like it. I'm also excited to watch all the haters start to copy this style in the coming months/years.

I appreciate the designy-ness of it, but yeah it seems way overdone, and the scrolling in Safari is totally janky. I feel like they're trying to do what Intercom is doing but completely backwards and a bit too late. But I love the experimentation in illustration and type, as wild and disconnected from the previous brand as it is.

This is a real left turn. I respect the boldness, but I can't say I'm a fan. The wild color palette and squished type isn't working. Dropbox is a mainstream, B2C + B2B brand and I think this might throw a good portion of users off (in both camps). It feels more like something that a high end branding agency with niche clients should be putting out.

With that said, their practical application of it isn't quite as jarring, so it might end up working pretty well: https://www.dropbox.com/

I would love to see some conversion and usability test results with this. They have a strong growth team, so I imagine they must have done a fair amount, but this doesn't strike me as something that would outperform their previous design. But I really do respect that they were able to pull this off at a corporation of that scale; hats off to the design and leadership teams. They got out there.

The actual new logo is a measured iteration from the old logo that combines vision with continuity. Basically what all other good rebrands have in common (Instagram for example).

Old:

New:

I see the rest of the brand, the numerous fonts and colors, as fertile soil for all types of future expressions. It’s highly flexible, yet coherent. For example, I think you’ll be able to immediately recognize the “Dropboxness” of anything that uses the new brand.

And even if you hate everything about it you have to admit those color combinations are 100 emoji

2 cents: This is kind of a classic example of a company with their branding in transition to the "what's next" phase of the company

When Apple first moved the design in iOS totally away from the skeuomorphic direction a lot of people complained. The change was jarring and very different from what customers were familiar with so it was expected that there would be a lot of push back.

My hunch: Dropbox is (obviously) taking their design/branding a totally different direction and rather then make it a slow transition (slowly iterating) they're "ripping the band-aid off". I would guess that the next few iterations they'll dial back some of the more extreme directions of this this shift in design to something more pragmatic.

Regardless, (even though I personally I don't like this new direction) I have to admire the bravado behind a company with such a large customer base to make such a drastic change in design.

What to think of this...

It's unfortunate that they are not accompanying this with statements about the future orientations of the company or even better, a new product release or major update. It comes off as snooty when it could mean "moving toward new directions". It says "I want to be bold and cool" so loud that it's struggling at telling something else... like what Dropbox concretely does, for starters.

That being said, I think they are still great with illustrations.

Now for the self-promotion : I did an unsolicited brand refresh of Dropbox a while ago. It was the exact opposite — incremental — and looked like this :

Dropbox brand refresh on Behance

Looking forward to their rebrand in 4 months when this one doesn't pan out, death throws of a director in burnout.

Whats with all the beef?!? Progressive, bold, clean, considered. Least its not another site with neon fades and "nice" illustrations that make every product look the same. Theres so many product home page trends, its nice to see someone has thought outside the (drop) box. Sorry

They will get a lot of international great awards with this rebrand. But they will loose companies trustness and confidence for not being corporate. They were a part corporate, but they also incorporated those amazing illustrations to give another straightforward feel.

I don't give much time to Dropbox... RIP

I personally think this looks excellent and really well thought out. A nice evolution with some seriously retro feels.

I kinda like it. This broadens the options they have for illustration work, and marketing. They are no longer bound to a small set of colors. The font doesn't appeal to me, but that's more subjective.

And I really like the sample they did for illustration. I think once their thoughts fully form, and we see it implemented it will be an interesting and unique experience.

I love the font, but it's almost impossible on first glance to work out what they actually do now. It looks like a trendy digital agency portfolio site, not a background file-syncing utility.

You now have to read four paragraphs and do some serious scrolling on their homepage before actually being able to discover what they do.

Here's a quick version of my thought process as I read down the page:

Put creative energy to work, with Dropbox

Okay, I already know what Dropbox is. Is this a new collaboration tool for designers, like InvisionApp or Marvel?

Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork – so you can focus on things that matter

Huh? Are we talking about an operating system here? A replacement for Finder or Windows Explorer? What do they mean by busywork? Dropbox's clone of Sketch/ Google Docs/Sheets/Slides? Can I edit files directly in the browser or what?

... Long scroll...

Keep everything organised without breaking your flow

A new file organiser? I'm confused.

Dropbox brings your files together, in one central place. They’re easy to find and safely synced across all your devices—so you can access them anytime, anywhere. No more wasting the day tracking down work.

Oh no, it's just plain old Dropbox. But they've lost their minds.

I guess when iCloud provides double the storage for almost the same price and is built into every Mac and iPhone they felt they had to do something bold.

I love it!

It's a bright shining signal that Dropbox is moving in a new direction, away from just being a "cloud storage company".

My kids love it #butnotme

Reminds me of https://aninterestingday.com/, down to the favicon

Really interesting to see the diversity here. Would love to learn more about the rationale behind their direction.

A system that scales: Meeting people where they are

Oh, so you guys are like a church? or a therapist?

Color can go from a standard Dropbox blue to “whoa.”

Yes, yes they certainly can.

259 fonts

It's not completely bad, but it will look dated in a few years. This style of whacky color palettes and abstract illustrations is very 2017.

After seeing the brand update, I researched the studio who worked on it (Collins) and noticed they have an extremely talented team of designers with a portfolio of great work. I'm a designer too and consider myself very open to new and unique design experiences.

I'm an original Dropbox user and have grown to love the brand. Historically I've considered Dropbox to be a designers brand, the likes of Apple or Nike, for me personally, something I think the new design team under appreciates. The brand was simple, elegant and iconic. Dropbox was the invisible service we can depend on. The design of Dropbox is so important to me that it is one of the determining factors in choosing it over competing services like Box despite it being more expensive (at the time).

I understand the downsides to the original brand. The overuse of corporate blue, differentiation within a highly competitive/commoditised market. However, the simplicity of the old design permeates the entire product experience. Perfectly simple enough for anyone to understand and use. This is a powerful idea. A design first company.

The brand update is a radical and verbose jolt in the opposite direction. It's a loud, opinionated, contentious, clashing and in-your-face take on what, in my mind and quite possibly many users, is the backbone to our studio's workflow. Frivolous visuals, marketing speak copywriting, bold colours... will these elements permeate my perfectly integrated Dropbox app user-interface? Please god no. I'm willing to leave Dropbox over this.

From a strategic positioning point of view, my guess is that Dropbox noticed that the great majority of their users are possibly freelance creatives, creative studios and such, and so maybe Drew made the decision to push the brand into a very public, consumer-focused, "creative" direction in a move to tap into this niche market. This is in stark contrast to what seemed to be a 2 years straight marketing campaign directed at Dropbox for business. Presumably Dropbox failed to compete with the likes of Box on the corporate front, and so now the idea is to focus on creatives, collaboration tools and so on. Not a bad strategy.

So why the hate? The design update is insensitive to Dropbox's past, its users and the underlying service itself. The design is unapologetic, loud and hyper fashionable/niche. It will date quickly and Dropbox will need another radical rebrand to keep up. It's as if the designers worked in a bubble. This is compounded by the self-congratulatory tweets and personal signatures all over the work as if the design were a personal work of art. And you know I wouldn't mind the signatures if the work weren't so self-serving, if the work were more modest and client-focused like the original macintosh where the Apple team signed the motherboard inside the computer.

It feels condescending to critique the specifics of the design given Collins agency and Dropbox have such a talented team of designers, but I'm sorry, I just can't get past the colour combinations, font choice and visuals in general.

I understand the theory behind the tension of colour clashes, but it's just not working. The colours are ugly together. Here are some samples of colours from the new palette. These colours don't work together on a whole.

The new typeface is lacks personality and utility. It's unbalanced and difficult to read on screens. It's not old enough to be retro and not modern enough to fit into today's aesthetic.

The visuals are interesting works of art on their own, however we now have three visual styles clashing in the brand. We have one-off works of photography art, hand-drawn illustrations similar enough to the old brand that I long for the old illustrations but different enough to feel out of whack with the new brand; and finally we have a mix of mini artworks semi based off the illustrative sketch style. The colour combinations in the sketch illustrations themselves work individually, but not in the context of the large blocks of heavy colours used on the .design demo site and the new dropbox homepage.

I hope the design team consider user feedback and understand where possibly most of the criticism is coming from.

Design gone bad. A literal Bible on how overly cute design gets in the way of the user experience. Hate to say it but this gives all of us a black eye.

I have one question - Would this have looked weird in the 80s?

To be honest, I don't understand what the fuzz is about yet. The actual design aside: this initiative feels like they sent somebody with a knife to a gunfight. Does it make sense to anyone, like - what is the goal here? Which issue is being addressed? Stuff like that?

Collins hits again. Using the very similar visuality they used at the Spotify re-branding. I just wondering how the new brand would applied to the product.

Hmm.

The dashboard looks good and is ok when used but the homepage is quite different and this .design presentation makes no sense. I can see this as an art presentation but i don't feel it makes sense here.

New Dropbox. By: Romero Britto

Nice colors.

Seems like a lot of effort for what is essentially just file storage

Wait wut?

Most people I have talked to say the same: Looks like a 6/10 design-university chaos from 8 years ago. Use of colors and fonts are straight from 2007. Has anyone of you a good alternative for me? I instantly want to quit my subscription.

:(

I feel vomiting seeing the color contrasts!!! :O=

Love it. Bold update, but looks like a pretty robust brand system that will let them evolve things and come back into the middle a bit.

I feel like 90% of people in this thread are mistaking the (admittedly horrible) announcement site for the new brand? But unless I'm mistaken I don't think the showcase site's design will have any impact on the main consumer-facing brand?

Anybody know how to achieve the masking effect over the logo that happens when scrolling the next div past it? I've seen this on parakeet.co for a while now.

Guys, what's the name of that illustration style?

I don't know why but for some reason it reminds of watching the Knowledge Network(If you're from BC you know the channel)/PBS kids when I was a kid. Past the negativity everywhere, I'm interested in seeing how this pans out for the product.