Dropbox (2017)Copied

By 2017 Dropbox wanted to be seen as a place to work together, not just somewhere to park files. VP of design Nicholas Jitkoff put it bluntly: the old blue box implied that Dropbox was a great place to store stuff. The October 2017 rebrand, the biggest change in the company's ten-year history, set out to change that impression.

The logo was simplified. Collins describes it as a set of identical diamond shapes that fit together into one larger mark, an expression of collaboration, and It's Nice That called it cleaner and simpler. The wordmark and all brand typography moved to Sharp Grotesk, chosen for its range. The real shift is everywhere else: a much braver palette of colours paired in deliberately unexpected combinations, alongside sketchy, pencil-drawn illustration that contrasts with the flat blocks of colour. The team's own line was that colour could now go from Dropbox blue to whoa.

Dezeen and Design Week both credit New York studio Collins, working with Dropbox's in-house brand studio; Design Week adds Xxix, Instrument and Animade, with Sharp Type drawing the typeface, which ships in more than 250 styles. Creative director Aaron Robbs and Jitkoff wrote that the system was built on diverse minds coming together, shown by pairing contrasting colour, type and imagery. The illustration also replaced the colored-pencil drawings of longtime creative director Jon Ying, who had left the year before, TechCrunch noted.

The reaction was loud. Dezeen led with the criticism: Twitter users said the colours made them feel colour blind and asked who came up with the horrid icon update, and Hacker News commenters argued Dropbox had misjudged its mostly non-designer users. TechCrunch was split, disliking the type but praising the logo as still recognisably a box, avoiding the missteps of Airbnb and Uber. Brian Collins later acknowledged the rollout could have been articulated better.

The system is meant to provoke. The collisions of colour and type are loud enough to feel like an art school poster rather than a SaaS company, which was the point. The simplified box itself is the least remarkable piece, and probably the most durable.