[makecheck]

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the decision-makers so what could go wrong? Um, maybe before you throw out all of your packaging everywhere and double-down, you could tone it down a little and try it out in a few small markets first? Then watch and see if sales are going up or down? Then think about going further?

And at this point there is also a tendency to ignore history. This is far from the first big failed redesign; what is going on that no one is looking at past failures (plenty of which have had high costs to other brands too), and imagining that there might be a downside?

[filmgirlcw]

I mean, as risky and brand and logo redesigns are, there is often a need to want to modernize or revitalize your logo or mark or packaging. It’s more difficult, the larger/older/more iconic your packaging is. That’s why the best logo and branding and packaging redesigns tend to either be the most iterative or have changed early in a product/brand’s lifecycle before he could be too associated with a company.

The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful.

Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand.

Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.

[mark-r]

One of my favorite graphics is this one detailing the evolution of the Pepsi logo vs. the Coca-Cola logo: https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-...

Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.

[lmkg]

One of those brands has endured for over 125 years, is today worth over $18 billion dollars, and is the 36th-most valuable company in the world.

The other is Coca-Cola.

Pepsi gets an absolutely undeserved amount of shit[1]. It's one of the most successful companies in the world. It's impressive on every single metric other than "is Coca-Cola." The fact that they can have that level of success while competing head-to-head with one of the most successful brands of all-time ought to be reason for accolades, not insults.

The takeaway that I choose to get from that graphic is that there are multiple paths to success, and one need not imitate the market-leader's strategy.

[1] Except that one logo document. It absolutely deserved all the shit it got for that one.

[filmgirlcw]

Yes!! I mentioned this meme in another comment because it is also one of my favorites!

Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.

[throwaway742]

I'm not sure AirBnB is a good example. Their brand is their name. They aren't a product on a shelf. I'm not sure there is a logo terrible enough to make someone close their website and not book a room.

[filmgirlcw]

Well, I think you run the risk of not making the app icon (if there is an app) or logo recognition worse. When Uber changed its logo to the weird map pickup thing from the “U” — it hurt them. That’s not a 1:1, obviously because Uber is much more homescreen reliant than Airbnb is, but that doesn’t mean too can’t have bad internet logo redesigns. To say nothing of terrible website redesigns, which have killed companies before (Digg v4).

Again, I’ve come around on the Airbnb one personally. I think it works now.

[throwaway742]

Point taken. I forget people use apps sometimes. I do everything through the browser.

[userbinator]

I suspect the "why" is most simply explained by "because designers had to justify their salaries."

[hbosch]

In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.

[firecall]

This is correct.

Management gets bored.

Source: Me, previously a Big Brand Marketing Manager

[strunz]

Not bored as much as "I need a big project to parlay into a VP/Executive role"

[irrational]

I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.

[nkozyra]

Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do.

I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off.

The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions.

Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.

[Agentlien]

For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site.

For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.

[Closi]

As a counterpoint, Facebook got criticism for each redesign but if they kept their 2001 aesthetic it would look and feel incredibly dated now.

[Agentlien]

I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.

[dfxm12]

Craig's List looks dated, but remains incredibly functional and is still the top site in its segment. Its dated look doesn't scare people away. It is still very functional. That's the important part.

[jjeaff]

I think that fatigue of seeing the same design is real. But I also think that for the most part, company employees, executives are the only people who see the sites frequently enough for it to be a problem.

[Closi]

I’ve absolutely sat in RFP processes where a product is discounted because it ‘feels old and legacy’, so you are absolutely right that there is value in the emotional feel of a product.

There is definitely a perception that if the front end of the product is old and hasn’t had a refresh, that it’s probably the same with the rest of the product and it’s sitting in maintenance mode.

[bigDinosaur]

It depends on what you view a website as.

- a tool?

- a marketing piece?

Redesign for the sake of it is usually bad for the former. It's fine (good?) for the latter.

[exmadscientist]

This is the right answer.

Major redesigns to marketing pieces (aka, advertisements) are fine. No one spends a long time staring at them anyway.

Major redesigns to tools will annoy the hell out of their users, unless things are done very carefully indeed (or the old tool was indisputably awful). You've got to look at how novices onboard to and use them, how intermediate users use them, how experts use them, and, if you can find one, how a master uses the tool. (The master will probably do something that surprises you. Make sure your redesign does not piss the master off, unless you like firefighting.) That's a lot of work!

Unfortunately, most things in life are tools by this definition, or at least close enough to them.

[unionpivo]

For some maybe.

But a lot of non techy users get confused very quickly. My family members, and not just older ones, are constantly having problems with app's changing things around, smart smart TV moving things around, apps changing icons etc.

I am usually their first call and I can tell you, that a lot redesigns, even when they are clearly better designs, leave a lot of users confused.

And it annoys me because not only are they usually annoyed when they call, but somehow its my problem. There is a reason why I am on backend. I don't like dealing with users.

[darkwater]

Not that different from some rewriting, refactoring or moving to $TECHNOLOGY I saw in the last 20 years of my career. Probably minus the travel/food...err no, I forget the mandatory conferences to understand better the new tech and know how other companies use it!

[qw]

It's similar to how some development choices are made too. Examples: Rewriting the system in a new language, change a framework or create your own from scratch.

I have fallen into that trap myself. I have read about some exciting new tech in a blog and want to try it out in a POC. There may be some excitement around it and suddenly it becomes a MVP and placed into production. Eventually it evolves into "legacy code" that developers hate to touch. The right approach is sometimes to step back, and rewrite the POC in a language/framework that can be supported by others.

[cawlin]

As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries.

Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.

[Spivak]

This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.

[moistly]

I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The "why" was pretty clearly explained in TFA:

> One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones.

The notable point here IMO is not "why did they do it?" but "how/why did it fail so badly?"

[stickfigure]

"reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones" is management consultant bullshit like "leverage our synergies to enhance the client experience". It means nothing. TFA did not explain anything.

You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

"the brand" is ill-defined. Is it the name "Tropicana" or is it the design of the packaging? In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. There are other cases where the name is retained through a total redesign without this sort of damage.

While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.

[bambax]

> In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former.

That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.

[mannykannot]

That would have been the fallacy of unjustifiably arguing from the general to the specific. What you have stated are arguments why a company might choose to rebrand. They are not arguments that Tropicana should have done it, and not when it did.

My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

[jrumbut]

The piece suffered from not having nearly enough detail here. Why did they choose that exact moment? What led them to choose the new design no one liked?

I would imagine the fruit juice industry is under some pressure. When I was a kid their product was viewed as a staple breakfast item that was beneficial to your health. These days its reputation is more like soda, too sugary for regular consumption.

Were they really redesigning for vague brand marketing reasons or were they grasping at straws to revive declining sales?

[qq66]

Well sometimes "why" is just to stay current. When I was a kid I thought those dated-looking boxes of "JIFFY" cake mix were actually boxes that nobody had bought and had been sitting there for 30 years.

[StanislavPetrov]

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.

[lm28469]

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone.

The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again.

I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.

[Nextgrid]

> why are you doing it?

Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.

[kwatsonafter]

To sort of riff off what you're saying; there might be some serious social, "whys" driving the more material, "why" of lackluster brand re-designs in the last 20 years. It seems like as companies are bought up by private equity groups (PAI Partners in Tropicana's case) quality and brand identity suffer. You really see this all over the place and another bad recession could reshuffle the board enough to let private wealth groups buy up what's left of the United States' viable domestic cultural export.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners

[throwaway0a5e]

>What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem

If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted.

If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...

[raverbashing]

You can't (and shouldn't) A/B a redesign.

There is much more than "this one is better than the other one" (to some random passer-bys)

[toss1]

Yup. The "Why?" question gets lost among the impulse to be 'clean and modern'.

>>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.

This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design.

The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.

Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED.

How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.

[creakingstairs]

> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics

I agree with your main point, but I have a small objection to this phrase. I don't think principles of design tells you to not care about usability/function. In fact, a good design is aesthetics AND function, as argued in "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].

So in this case, the designers are simply not doing their job. They've been infatuated with their principles of aesthetics, that they didn't follow the actual principles of design. Which happens when designers blindly copy the latest trend.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that one might interpret the phrase to mean that design is not about function, which isn't fair to many great designers out there.

[1]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Don-Norman/dp/0465050654

[toss1]

Agree, I should have specified "aesthetic principles" (vs "'principles' of design and aesthetics").

Yes, the actual great designers put function first, then solve the now-harder problem of simplifying the aesthetics without sacrificing the function.

Had an architect (trained, licensed, etc.) propose a redesigned front porch and put a support post right square in front of an existing bay window. Sure, from the front elevation view, it looked great, but squarely blocked the view from inside. Also proposed just building the wrap=around part without moving a natgas meter, just left it obstructing part of the side entry. What a waste of time and money - she just solved the problems she wanted to solve (e.g., make it look good in her drawing) and ignored all the other problems - and was proud of that.

This is the problem - real design is hard because it includes ALL the problems and the constraints they create. Too many (I'd say most, in my experience), just focus on the problems they want to solve, ignore the rest, and think they've done a good job, when in fact they completely failed. And the real problem is management that accepts that crap as completed work and pushes it out on the customers.

[karaterobot]

> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.

The original package was created by designers too. It worked, and then, many years later, a second group of designers responded to a new set of requirements with another design, which did not. This is how it goes. Failure is a possibility when you try something new. It's not like there's a foolproof system that works every time, and if you experience a setback it's because you forgot to apply the foolproof system.

On the engineering side, applications and services break all the time. I don't generally a consider it a failure of engineering as a discipline when that happens. Failures can even be caused by mistakes, but that doesn't mean the people involved are stupid or lazy or careless. It's the risk of moving quickly in a complicated world with many overlapping systems. Design and marketing are not spared from this unfortunate truth.

[jan_Inkepa]

I wonder if some of the "why" isn't the general turn against straws in the current zeitgeist.

[codys]

The article indicates the re-design in question was "launched" in January 2008. This is the date where planning the redesign began.

Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009.

A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018).

So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.

1: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...

2: https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-envi...

[codys]

Whoops: I missed a "not" in the last sentence. Should be:

> So in this case, the plastic straw issue does _not_ necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.

[jan_Inkepa]

Well that shows how well I read the original article. Thanks for the correction.

[Kaotique]

I think a lot of times a redesign is simply used as a tool for a manager/exec to have an impact, any impact really. It does not matter so much if the net result is positive or negative. It looks good on their resume. "Joined company X and spearheading redesign project of X". Designer companies love it, they can let their imagination run wild and the managers will gobble up whatever they come up with.

This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.

[donarb]

If I were the hiring manager, the first question I'd asked is, what were the results of that redesign?