Evolving the Dropbox Brand | Hacker News Reader

Evolving the Dropbox Brand

dropbox.design

124 pointstanoku67 comments

Wow. that is (from my perspective - but only mine) terrible.

Janky scrolling, things flying around, random animations that don't finish before you scroll past them.

The left / right alternate scroll is .... unsettling.

It hurts my eyes...

I don't often agree with statements like this on HN, but this site probably the worst designed I have ever encountered that wasn't made that way intentionally. Seriously terrible. I can't imagine it's all that accessible for people with disabilities as well.

I thought something was wrong with my browser because it wouldn't scroll. How does a company with this much money fail so hard at web design?

Hit the down arrow key and some javascript is exposed. Was that intentional I wonder?

I literally changed browsers thinking that something in my browser (nightly FFx) was breaking the site.

Kind of glad to see it's just another bad design decision and nothing else.

The alternating scrolling is especially bad on a touchscreen because the scrollable page area also alternates between the left and right sides of the page. You have to swipe on one side of the page until it stops, then deduce that you haven't hit the page end and then start swiping in the other side of the page.

I get the metaphor and all, but I found this statement to be pretty over-the-top:

> Our old logo was a blue box that implied, “Dropbox is a great place to store stuff.” The new one is cleaner and simpler. And we’ve evolved it from a literal box, to a collection of surfaces to show that Dropbox is an open platform, and a place for creation.

Maybe this is just an intermediate step in an attempt to preserve some brand continuity, and something more radically different is coming later, but the new logo sure looks a lot like a blue box to me. I literally didn't realize the logo next to this text was the new logo, I kept scrolling down looking for something that wasn't clearly a box.

I actually agree that the new logo is an improvement -- it really is "cleaner and simpler" -- but I think it is ridiculous to look at that new logo as anything more than (or other than) a stylized box.

Not sure I understand the strategy here, was under the impression that Dropbox wanted to move further into the enterprise (read:lucrative) space which would favor a constant, subtle, and functional "boring" scheme.

This seems like a tear in the opposite direction and I'm not sure which target user/market it was designed to appeal to. Maybe it's just a refresh to try and stay top-of-mind in the face of competition from Google, Microsoft, and Box.

This is the worst UX I've seen in a long time. Not only that, it's visually garish. Apparently the designers at Dropbox have never heard of color theory.

My initial impression was they were intentionally breaking color theory rules, maybe as a way to stand out. It gives off a trendy, hipster vibe. I can't imagine this aesthetic aging well.

it gives me a 'geocities' vibe.

That's a great way of describing it.

It give me a "I just discovered LSD" vibe.

The marketing language describes it as a celebration of "creativity". In that regard, I do find the work of various artists they're featuring (particularly the portrait and illustration at the top) to be great and in line with their stated principles. Really though, the colors and typography on this page don't work well. Going against the grain doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater (or aesthetics in this case). Even some of the most envelope-pushing artists of the past century, like Basquiat or Rothko, understood this and broke rules in a way that expressed some creative truth. Maybe I'm overthinking it but it's going to take more than "creativity for creativity's sake" for me to appreciate what's going on here.

All this scrolling is making my finger hurt. Have to scroll the equivalent of 100 A4 pages to get content that would have fit onto a sticky note.

It seems like it would be at home on a Commodore 64, maybe they're working on a port?

My response to this site as someone who has had a paid Dropbox account for years:

Oh no. Oh... no. follow link to dropbox.com Ugh. What happened?

I'm now under the impression Dropbox will go out of business and I need to explore alternatives.

Edit: I think I identified what makes me intensely dislike it. The color scheme and design screams "This is no longer for you, it's for hipsters."

I see what they wanted to do, but I think they misjudged their users. The non design oriented people using this will probably think that this is horrible - which it is (for this purpose). This kind of playful and color heavy design isn't new or bad, it's just that it has a really hard time breaking out of the art/design magazine area. It's impractical, forces the user to look extra hard, uses non-traditional color combinations with weird contrasts. Whoever greenlit this made a mistake.

We don't know how the UI will look, which is what matters. Of course the design announcement will be over-designed.

That typeface is just dreadful. Dropbox is a utilitarian business product, not a mid-century art exhibit.

Yeah, the text is really weird, I had a hard time reading any of it. The letters just seem too wide, out of proportion. I almost wonder if I have an extension blocking some adaptive-text-resizing script or something, because it doesn't seem like they'd actually want it to look that way...

They have posted some additional information on their blog: https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/creative-energy-ke...

You can see the new frontpage here: https://www.dropbox.com/allyours

> That’s why today we’re excited to tell...

I always perceive words like "excited" in PR statements as corporate narcissism. This kind of language shows that they have become too self-absorbed, the new unfitting design is just another symptom of it.

Seems very similar to Spotify's recent-ish rebranding. Which makes sense as the same agency appears to have worked on it https://www.wearecollins.com/work/spotify/

Wow, that scrolling is a trainwreck

Indeed, I'm kitted out with the same hipster mac I suspect the design folks use, yet simply scrolling down was a mess. Not sure what they tested this with :/

Yup. This is what it looks like in Safari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE

Agreed. Also, it seems to have completely broken Ctrl-F functionality. I especially hated how it encouraged resizing the browser to check different fonts, and then just pushed me back to the top of the page making me fight the scrolling system to get back to where I was.

This reminds me of the time I watched the video about Uber's new logo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1-im6i8uk

Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? It feels like a bad joke.

Everyone is dumping on this, but I, for one, applaud their daring to try something that doesn't look like every other SaaS brand out there. (And besides, Box.com already beat them to that.)

It's probably totally subjective but I find the typeface needlessly "wide" and the colour palette unpleasant - especially that dark red and cyan combination in the new homepage [1]. It has some sort of retro Microsoft Frontpage '97 vibe.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/rcZxsLs.png

It's like they switched from RGB to HSB colors without actually changing any of the values.

Also, [do unnecessary scrolling tricks justify requiring JavaScript?](https://i.imgur.com/9mVzkaY.png)

Let's hope this brand evolution is better engineered than the web page that's announcing it. The scrolling is appalling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPWaKHmAhE

Looks stylish and artistic. Not exactly what I usually think of when I think of Dropbox. I use them mostly cause they're the most reliable cloud storage method I've tried. But looks nice to me.

This is just so sad. I've used, paid for, and loved Dropbox for years and years. It is really worrying that anyone in the company felt it was OK to launch this rebrand.

> Hello, this is Sharp Grotesk

They nailed it on grotesk

This makes me sad. I can barely read that new typeface. If I were on the market for a files backup solution, I'd want the product to communicate robustness and reliability. This combination of whimsy and the site simply not working sends a bad signal.

I haven't looked into details, but the presentation looks pretty garish. I think the best thing about Dropbox is that you don't notice it. It just works. A garish, attention-grabbing logo is the exact opposite of what Dropbox should represent.

What is this nightmare? Neither the Space bar, Down Arrow or Page Down keys are working on this page in Firefox. I don't see the scrollbar either, so I cannot guess how much will I have to scroll using the [sigh] mousewheel.

this has to be the worst website i've been on since 1997

double scroll bars? I can't scroll by clicking? all kinds of colors that don't work, i'm so confused right now i'll just pretend it didnt exist..

Urgh, gross. Visual vomit — totally impractical and communicates nothing.

Who approved this?

Uhhh, did they only change the logo? Did they come out with a new product, or alter Dropbox's functionality?

I really don't understand what this is all about.

Wow, this is truly terrible. Those colors are godawful.

I see what they're trying to do, but feel like it went horribly wrong at some point and got forced into beeing a lifestyle magazine...

It's almost like they used a random color palette generator. The colors they chose look entirely random to my eyes.

Wow, that broke my browser (chrome, no less). I love innovative UX, but multiple internal scrollbars, a <noscript> tag that shows up as text at the bottom of the page, hijacked and then broken scrolling. Looks more like a college web design project than something that would come out of a top web company... yikes.

I was truly convinced that this must be a third party joke, but it appears Dropbox really does own dropbox.design.

If this becomes the new trend in design, I might have to get out of the business.

Looks like they are modifying the site to fix some of the complaints here. It doesn't seem to have two scrolling areas and standard keyboard navigation seems to work.

The colors and typography are still hideous, though.

The scroll on the page is a terrible idea. I was under the impression the page has a problem, with the delay between the left/right pane, until I realized it was intentional ...

very bad ux on this one

agreed. the scrolling is awful and the text placement and sizing is weird.

"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." No thanks, there're exactly zero reasons to have webpage like this JS only.

There are two scrollbars, and both of them don't work!

The left one doesn't scroll, the right one reveals some weird script tag.

Omg the site is so jerky in desktop Safari.

It's also similarly bad on iPad mobile Safari, actually making me feel a bit sick...

What are fellow HN'ers using for file sync/sharing? I was a Dropbox early adopter but haven't been as impressed as of late, with Dropbox suddenly trying to integrate into my MS Office apps and trying to upload my screenshots and photos.

I'm not a huge fan of Google Drive's recent redesign either. I like box.com but haven't moved anything yet.

Resilio Sync, although I'm not necessarily advocating for it. It's nice to have an option where nothing is in "the cloud".

Is godawful rainbow design the new thing now? First Mozilla, and now Dropbox?

I get two scrollbars. First time I've seen that.

very spotify-ish

Why is this marked as a duplicate? It seems to be the only post from this url, and the only post with the phrase "dropbox brand"

The old dropbox for me had a spectacular unique design and i really loved it. The design of the file browser before the previous one was imho the best.

I feel like this is a huge step backwards and if the seamless experience of using dropbox worsens i will consider switching. But then again i am not a paying customer.

The jerky scrolling on that page isn't pleasant.

This shouldn’t be marked as a dupe. It’s a new redesign.

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