I like Bloomberg's redesign. It's bizarre but fun.

Moreover, Bloomberg is a media company (well, at least the magazine). They have much more license to be insane.

Dropbox is a productivity company and the redesign seems...unwanted? What corporate executive is looking at his Dropbox and thinking that you know, this needs some Sharp Grotesk

What I like about Bloomberg's design team is that they try to navigate a fine line between being serious and playful. It's not easy because you could easily find yourself being too safe, where the playfulness ends up being too corporate and forced.

I remember going to the Bloomberg Design Conference a few years back, where they opened with an intro movie featuring their design team satirizing the design process by critiquing a white sheet of paper, eventually settling on a rotated version.

>This is what the general 404 page used to be:

>https://imgur.com/gallery/0MoqU4Y

Used to be?

https://www.bloomberg.com/gdhdsgsd

The trending feed they have on their homepage is just bizarre -- it scrolls at 2x or 3x the speed of the main body. Half of me is not a fan, but the other half thinks it fits in with the design of the rest of the page (notwithstanding the question of whether /that/ is good).

the last one is creepy but informative. Btw: bloomberg managment doesnt know about it; its just their webdesigner being big fan of Musk.

Bloomberg's design rules.

It looks like a person from hot topic got inspired by the Apple iPod / iPhone commercials and decided to go crazy with it. Awful execution.

Please for all that is holy, tell me they got hacked or something?

The type is named “Sharp Grotesk”. Seriously... how many meetings involved lines like “We’re trying to decide between Grotesk and xxxx”, “what do you think of Grotesk”, “I need sign off on this Grotesk typeface”.

> That's all anyone wants out of them

I'm sure they have better data on this than you or I do. There is an unfortunate tendency on HN to assume people are idiots who don't know what they're doing, as evidenced by every "why does company X need Y engineers??!!" comment.

This is what has made Dropbox so successful. You have files. They sync. It does one thing and it does it really well.

I'll also admit their enterprise tool that lets you sync only some files as you need them is also seems cool, although I've never worked at a place that used it, and even if I did, I'd probably have to use it in a VM since I've used Linux at my last three jobs.

Dropbox could try to build new products. Keep Dropbox as it is, but then try to branch out and build other tools. Maybe other office tools, or project management tools? They could keep the same login systems if they wants to pitch them to enterprise. But I agree, their core product is sold and should stay that way. Their brand can help them quite a bit if they start offering other products, but only if they're up to the same quality.

Except investors. This "collaborative platform" angle is clearly designed with the IPO roadshow in mind.

Probably because it's a dangerous place to be in long term. Storage is going to get cheaper and cheaper from the big guys. Already for me there's no point to paying for DropBox when I can pay for iCloud for similar prices and get all the benefits of the integration that storage provides that DropBox doesn't (photos, etc) for the whole ecosystem.

I've never needed to get more storage with DB… the free was always good enough though I'm also sure I'm not a big expense to them… many free users are.

Design fashion has the property that if you do something that pushed the envelope it always seems wrong until it becomes normal and other brands adopt it.

> I feel like it’s some sort of reference to popart

I was hoping it's supposed to be a hommage to vintage electronics manuals.

I don't think it's the aesthetics that people react to. The aesthetics are a little on the 1980s neon retro side, but personally, I find this almost creepily dissonant purely in how far the message is from the product. Nobody would deny that lots of people use Dropbox for "creative" work. But Dropbox itself has nothing to do with creativity -- there's no sense in which Dropbox itself can be a fun, zany, kinetic kind of experience. It's not GoPro. It's a folder that syncs. This design reeks of someone uncool trying to appeal to a young, fashion-conscious demographic, with cringeworthy results. It's as transparently cynical as any attempt Microsoft (for example) have ever made to appeal to anyone younger than 30.

It's beautiful, fun and quite daring. I would generally opt for the 'straightforward and professional looking' solution, but that might be because I'm boring and generally unimaginative.

Kinda sad realizing that you prefer this, but would chose boring just because it's somehow more safe.

The uniformity of response in this thread is what feels like a joke.

They also recently switched the clever black and white fork logo for UberEats to a very generic green and white with no symbol, just the name "Uber Eats". Weird