Dropbox (2013)Copied

Dropbox's first icon was a product of its time: an open cardboard box rendered as a detailed, glossy illustration with gradients, highlights and shadows, the kind of web icon that looked good at one size on one screen. At the end of July 2013 users opening the site or the app found the box redrawn.

The new mark keeps the idea, an open box seen from above, but builds it from flat, solid blue geometric planes. The gradients and shadows are gone, and the wordmark beside it was simplified to match. The Spanish trade site Reason Why described Dropbox as having ironed its logo flat, leaving shadows and transparency to nostalgists.

Dropbox explained the change itself in a September 2013 blog post titled Simplify your brand. Its co-founder and CEO, Drew, had made the first logotype in 2007, and the glyph was born in 2009 when the company's original designer drew a reduced version of the logo for the iPhone app. The new guidelines phased out the older, more illustrative logo and doubled down on that glyph, while unifying all the app icons. The company's case for it: simple, functional, recognisable at small and large sizes, workable in colour and black and white, and made of solid shapes that hold up in physical environments. Plus, it joked, you can fax the heck out of it.

Techlomedia reported that the flat glyph was already in use across the Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS apps, with the colours swapped on Windows 8 to suit its tiles, and placed the move in a run of flat redesigns that also included Yahoo's new logo. Reason Why, for its part, quoted one critic who said the new shape made a never-ending box that not even Maru, the internet's box-loving cat, would jump into.

The criticism misses the point. The 2013 change is less a redesign than the moment Dropbox stopped being a website and became a brand. The box idea was strong enough to survive the loss of the rendering, and a mark you can fax is a mark you can put anywhere.