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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
72 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 82.2 ms ] threadYou can see the new frontpage here: https://www.dropbox.com/allyours
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.
I'm not a huge fan of Google Drive's recent redesign either. I like box.com but haven't moved anything yet.
Janky scrolling, things flying around, random animations that don't finish before you scroll past them.
The left / right alternate scroll is .... unsettling.
Kind of glad to see it's just another bad design decision and nothing else.
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."
[1] https://i.imgur.com/rcZxsLs.png
> 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.
Also, [do unnecessary scrolling tricks justify requiring JavaScript?](https://i.imgur.com/9mVzkaY.png)