JetBrains redesigned their website and logos | Hacker News Reader

JetBrains redesigned their website and logos

jetbrains.com

77 pointsjavinpaul71 comments

I like JetBrains and their products. I am glad they exist.

My take: The site is not really appropriate given that their supposed target demographic is developers who are quick to cut through marketing BS and skip to the details. All the flash and distraction leads me to...

My guess: They will be selling the company in the next year or so and are adding (perceived) value for the prospective buyers. Just from my past experience.

The writing was on the wall for JetBrains as soon as Microsoft announced Roslyn, pretty much ensuring that somebody (maybe volunteers, maybe Microsoft itself) would write an open-source version of ReSharper with better VS integration than the real thing. Management knows this and they're trying to get some money for it while they can.

Are you kidding? JetBrains is much more than just ReSharper. They might make some enterprise bucks off it, but it's definitely not what makes or breaks the company.

are you missing a 'not' in your last sentence?

I am, thanks.

> ...their supposed target demographic is developers who are quick to cut through marketing BS and skip to the details.

Although developers are their end users, they don't make up the entirety of the site's target audience. From my other comment in this thread:

As ridiculous as it sounds, the design of a software company's marketing site affects the impression a buyer will have of that company. A site that looks like it hasn't been updated in years can make someone think the software itself is outdated, or the company is slow-moving, or the company isn't growing anymore. If you're the CEO, CMO, or head of sales at JetBrains (or any other software co), that is NOT what you want people to think of you.

https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/ yolo

Completely disagree. For me it actually gave the impression that things might be going in a better direction for them. I can only hope the desire for design gets put into their products. They're currently stuck in the 90s in UX.

I won't be surprised if Google buys them.

I agree, especially as Google already relies on them for their Android Studio (http://developer.android.com/tools/studio/index.html ).

I will be. Acquiring a software development company like JetBrains would provide absolutely no value to Google, and would go completely against their new corporate structure.

very selfish, but I would very much like to see that happen.

Between Kotlin and the IntelliJ team, this could benefit a lot to the Android ecosystem.

I think the target demographic includes the managers and corporate types who are responsible for approving software licenses for products like JetBrains.

It took long enough for the home page to load that I wondered whether it is broken. That's not a good message for a company that makes software tools. From a perspective of graphic design and branding it is pretty busy. As an immediate fix I'd use all logos from clients only in black and white and reserve the use of color for my own message. The generous use of gradients in logos creates an already dated look.

Geez, tough crowd.

I'll play devil's advocate:

_You_, the engineer, may think design is useless and the old one worked just fine. But _you_ are not the only one JetBrains sells to: They're also selling to the managers and executives who make buying decisions at "big" companies -- ie, the kind of companies where a six-figure software deal must go through countless evaluations.

See also http://splunk.com, http://newrelic.com, http://appdynamics.com, etc. They're not so stupid to be spending money on redesigns if it didn't help with sales and growth.

The loading time is too damn high. For the longest time it just showed me black screen. I didn't remember what their old logo looked like, so I looked it up and it was pretty bad, like a shareware software logo from the 90s. The new one is much better. Also, I'm disappointed that their CLion software (abbreviated as CL) has nothing to do with Common Lisp.

I have no opinion on the logos, but what's up with that intro? is this 2001?

While I think it's a strange choice, it only does that on your first page load, and I suspect that it is a temporary "new branding roll-out" type thing.

First load per browser/session. At least there's no intro in w3m (actually a bit sad about that, seems like a missed opportunity).

I like the new website, but the logo screams the old Zune logo[0], especially when it's animated in the intro feature.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Zune_log...

Not a fan of the weird "intro". Just show me the content I came for. I don't have an opinion on the new logo, but I definitely think they should have put more work in making this redesign easier to navigate and more readable. It looks like it was a redesign for the sake of a redesign. What problem was this trying to solve?

> What problem was this trying to solve?

The usability on the old site was too high, developers loved it but management were confused by the directness and lack of bullshit.

So they redesigned it for sales, and away from their core demographic.

PS - Google should really penalise sites that operate intros.

I liked old site: it was warm and fuzzy.

> Type `man cookies' to learn more or `exit' to close.

> ~ root$

Really gives the site an "over-engineered just for funsies" look and feel. Why not just a link and be done with it? While cool the first time, it's just clutter that adds nothing of value to the site.

For a company that focuses on products that "just work, and work well" this website is giving off the wrong impression.

Fun has value.

im laughing that this is a downvoted sentiment on hackernews

Me too!

One interesting thing I've noticed is that my comments like this often get downvoted to -1 or -2, then go back up. It happened for this one. I wonder why that is. Are grumpy people more likely to get in early?

I was expecting a "man careers" easter egg. Bitter disappointment :(

In today's climate that joke would be considered sexist and inappropriate.

I'm surprised and impressed that this is usable on mobile though! That said, "Exit" didn't work which is a bit silly.

Are you kidding? That joke is the funniest thing I've seen on the Internet in years and the only really cool thing about the site.

Hate it. Besides being kind of gaudy, it's simply less readable than the old site. Instead of having all of the product information neatly laid out in easily readable columns, I now have to scroll constantly.

I mean, I know it's the current design fad, but I wish it would stop.

  Sorry, your browser is not fully supported

  There may be some issues with pages layout in your 
  current browser. 
  Please use an alternate browser until we resolve the issues. 
  Thank you.

and no way to skip - it's fullscreen, I see no website.

Which browser are you using?

I can't help but mentioning that their logo does not load without allowing JavaScript (NoScript user here).

Have we really reached the point where JavaScript is required to display a logo on a website?

Yes.[1] The rest of the internet has been there for a while now. Many high quality web applications utilize javascript frameworks to render the majority of the page. If you use NoScript today, you should be able to reasonably expect most of the web to be broken and not lament it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_libraries#W...

Actually most of the page does load with JS disabled with exception of their logo.

> "The rest of the internet has been there for a while now."

This is not my experience at all. Most of the sites I use, especially text/image content-driven websites, load fine without JS and it saves me from having to deal with a lot of annoying UX issues.

In fact, in this case I was able to avoid having to suffer through the intro JetBrains decided to show visitors on this website, until just out of curiosity I decided to enable JS to see if their logo would render.

I am well aware that some web applications use JavaScript frameworks but even then it's possible to render content for SEO and other purposes where JS might not be enabled. Certainly the logo can and should be rendered without JS even in these cases.

I would imagine that web applications implemented in a JavaScript framework are a minority as should be the case. The vast majority of websites simply display text and images and there is no sane reason to require JS just to view text and image content.

> there is no sane reason to require JS just to view text and image content

Especially for a logo.

Coupled with the intro video, it feels like we're back in the early 2000's where flash intros to every site ruled the web.

Why not lament it?

Oh, I certainly think there's justification for lamenting the state of javascript web apps. In the post, I really meant to say "complain about it."

Every day, competent programmers retire and clueless n00bs replace them.

The website looks great, but what's with that stupid intro?

Neither informs nor amuses the user. It's just (beautiful) clutter.

I'm going to put in the lonely voice of support for the new design.

Wow. An intro animation. What is this? 1999?

Looks like a bunch of the bloomberg.com designers broke out of their NY offices and took over Jet Brains'... Could this mean 90's gradients are making a comeback? I hope not, for the sake of my eyes.

It's not a responsive design, and they don't redirect to a mobile friendly version. Granted, most visitors are likely to be on a desktop or laptop, but why go through all this trouble to redesign your entire site (and company?), but stick to old design methods not catered towards the "modern" web?

If you look at the underlying markup, you can see that the web site was designed to be responsive. The sad part however is that it's going to take a bit more time for mobile resolutions to be supported properly.

I tried it using Chrome Dev Tools and emulated several mobile devices (some apple, some android, etc...) and even after a refresh and dumping cache, it did not go into responsive mode. It only gets smaller so the entire page fits on-screen for the mobile.

This has nothing to do with supporting mobile resolutions. The site just doesn't do responsive... at all.

I don't like it. The icons are way to abstract compared to the old ones.

The first 3 seconds made me tell myself this UI/UX is annoying. After the remaining seconds, I was like "Dayummmm, that is sick"

They do need to work on the responsiveness of that site.

Hmmm... I would like it if Adobe hadn't already taken that "periodic element" icon style. But even then, the older icons were far more clear.

My first initial thought was this looks a lot like Adobe.

Jesus fuck this completely overloads my brain. Especially when opening the menu's to look at the IDE's...all those mash of colours my brain can't order the information...

Did Jetbrains not consider Gestalt rules when designing this? Their design completely messes with this in my head and I hypothesise that's why I can't order information.

I use IDEA and still think it is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used.

That said, the new branding is...troubling. Aesthetics is a matter of taste, over-engineering and fuss are not. KISS never goes out of style.

It is troubling, because it may hint at suits taking over. I hope I am wrong.

JetBrains did something really cool. I'm second year paying user of WebStorm & PHPStorm. Totally rocks.

But ...

Last company I worked for I also used IntelliJ IDEA. And it's pretty obvious that IDEA is their main-focused project, which is superior than the others. For example WebStorm still doesn't have nice TypeScript support ( 1.7 is not supported and overall typescript seems to be buggy ).

Also they should've probably spend more time and "rebrand" their UI ... I'm sick of dracula and default themes. Atom is a masterpiece on design nowadays.

I love JetBrains, and this new branding is sharp.

There's still a perception in some communities that IDEs are clunky things for old-timers. The new branding helps to lift that image. I think it will appeal to those who've never considered an IDE.

It's also a welcome refresh for any PhpStorm users like me who've always felt a little short-changed with the old logo – it used to feel awkward in the dock, particularly compared with the other JetBrains IDEs.

I quite like the new branding. It's bright and creative, stands out from the minimalism currently in vogue, and gives them lots of leeway for designing distinctive logos for different products that still reference the overall brand.

I think the splash page is a strange choice though, and I don't see why they wouldn't have a static svg fallback of the logo.

First they changed their price options, now this redesign... I wonder if it's a business equivalent of "jumping the shark" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark ?

I like it and I like the intro.

Getting downvoted for this? Sometimes the negativity on here is just too much.

Not a big fan of all the marketing language on the home page. But it does get better on the individual IDE pages. You see the download link right away and you can scroll down if you need more info.

The intro doesn't even work on mobile and is just a black screen...have to hit the x to get out, and it's not even mobile optimized...

Am I the only one to think that the new icons look like a bit of a console, the line below is the cursor and the letters the product initials.

You're not.

I have video disabled in my browser because I'm a reader, and all I saw was "LOADING..." and a close button.

The new site does communicate more clearly: we're the Adobe of the IDE world.

Pay annually? No thanks.

I agree that we're Adobe of the IDE world is crap.

But is it really 100$ so expensive for an average developer? Consider how much money you're making because you have these tools.

i liked the cookie warning. i am just visiting jetbrains to download ide. i don't know whom for they had created those web agency style web site, but i don't care while their download button is working.

The InteliJ 15 loading splash is hideous, and looks like it was designed by a 12 year old or someone who couldn't be bothered to spend more than 5 minutes on it. JetBrains obviously doesn't have a designer on staff.

On the contrary, it looks like a designer created this with absolutely no input from anyone else.

At least it doesn't hurt my eyes like the IJ 13 splash screen: http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/files/2013/12/splash13-1.png

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