The Dropbox rebrand

Dropbox unveiled its new brand, a collaboration between the in-house team and design studio Collins yesterday, and its created quite a stir in the world of design!

Brand Values

The push behind the rebrand comes from changing the way we use Dropbox. Moving away from ‘the place we store final files’ and towards creating a ‘living workspace that brings teams and ideas together‘. The design decisions around this change make sense – the tone and feel of the rebrand is creative. But in instigating this change, has dropbox lost the core values a utility brand would want to communicate?

The message Dropbox wants to communicate has changed – online storage is now commonplace, and they can no longer call themselves market leaders with Google drive and OneDrive widely used. Their new mission is to inspire creative energy. This may well be a mission their users (business professionals  to scientists and creative types) are fully on board with, however I believe dropbox’s role is to aid creativity, rather than be creative! To use a slightly lazy analogy – I want our accountants to support a dozen eggs in our creative endeavours, I do not want any creative accountancy!

Developing a brand strategy is a complex procedure, balancing audience expectations with business direction, establishing the purpose of the company and how that feeds into the values. For me, this new dropbox rebrand fails to tick all the boxes. Whilst the new message of inspiring creative energy is obvious and the visual language is bold, the expectations of what users are expecting feels like its been forgotten on route.

Communicating the change

Did you hear about the dropbox rebrand? This maybe the first you knew of it! My assumption is the news and resulting communication was released for the design community only and to generate a PR buzz.

The best way to communicate change to users is to talk to them! As users we are more aware of brand than we were 5 years ago. We want to understand the differences between certain brands. We want to know why we should care!

A while ago I wrote about the University of California rebrand. To summarise, the rebrand was considered, and well developed. The reveal was not! The design team released a video which seemed to communicate that the much loved university seal had been ‘swept away’. In reality, this hadn’t been the case, with the seal a large part of the design process. As designers, we spend a long time making logical, incremental decisions. Ironically, we can then fail to communicate that process, resulting in confusion and annoyance.

The dropbox rebrand is full of interesting elements. Personally, I like the artists work that has been featured, and it communicates creativity. However, an assumption has been made that users will understand the brand, without much explanation – with an emphasis on the visual rather than how the product can help me.

Flexible branding

At a dozen eggs, we are huge fans of flexible branding – we believe brands can take more risks with how they communicate – no longer needing to rely on their logo to do all the work.

Alongside the dropbox rebrand they launched a site dedicated to explaining the design decisions. The site celebrates a flexible approach to branding, with colour and typography playing a leading role in the brand language. This approach works well for a variety of companies and can lead to successful brands. However, when the context is limited – Dropbox has very few ‘offline’ opportunities to demonstrate its flexibility – can appear overworked.

Will users be able to recognise the core brand? We are interested to observe the changing narrative of the brand, and how Dropbox can continue to promote their business values clearly. There are brands who have balanced the notion of inspiring creativity and establishing a core visual. The Poetry Foundation – designed by Pentagram – is one of those.

The Poetry Foundation is a magazine with an online archive of prose, poems and spoken word. Part of the reason for the success of the Poetry Foundation’s brand is due to the fact that one of their values is around holding tension in the extremes; poetry can be simple and complex, quite and disturbing, bold and delicate.  Therefore, highlighting the mixture of typographic application works well.