The Dropbox rebrand features a logo update, new typography and vibrant illustration collaborations

Dropbox has unveiled a complete rebrand by its in-house team in conjunction with design studio Collins, the biggest change to the company’s visual identity in its 10-year history. Featuring a “cleaner and simpler” logo, a typography shift to Sharp Grotesk, and a wealth of vivid illustration collaborations, the rebrand injects energy to the brand’s image. Collins also worked alongside studios Instrument, XXIX, Sharp Type and Animade on the project.

The illustration commissions represent a change in style for the brand, displaying a shift in focus towards being a “living workspace”, or moving its users “from ‘knowledge workers’ to ‘creative workers’,” explains Dropbox’s creative director Aaron Robbs and vice president of design Nicholas Jitkoff. According to a blog post by the designers, the brand has been repositioned as a place “where in-progress work happens as opposed to old finished project storage”. In the illustrations, this manifests as a “sketchy”, pencil-drawn style of illustration to maintain a raw feel, that also contrasts the block colours and shapes of the wider branding.

Along the same vein, one aspect of the launch campaign sees Dropbox invite pairs of artists of differing styles and disciplines to collaborate on “co-creation imagery”, as a “visual metaphor” for the importance of collaboration in the creative process. These split screen images have been made by illustrator David McLeod with photographer Davy Evans; and illustrator Lynnie Z with photographer Alexandra Gavillet.

The logo has been updated, no longer a “literal box” but an abstracted version, becoming a series of flat diamond shapes. Collins chose to revamp the entire brand’s typography, including its core wordmark, using Sharp Grotesk for its “versatility” and sheer range of 259 fonts. Together with a braver colour palette that “juxtaposes in unexpected ways”, this allows the brand to “speak in a variety of tones”. According to the team, the homepage redesign aims to tell its “new story in a bold, evocative way”.

“Our new system lets us pick the right amount of expressiveness for the situation,” the designers explain. “Colour can go from a standard Dropbox blue to ‘whoa’. Same for type, photography, and illustration. In a marketing campaign, we can dial things up to provoke and inspire creative energy. But in our product, where people need to concentrate on their work, we can dial it down.” The brand has also released an ad on YouTube to launch the rebrand.