Surely, you know a fairytale about the Beauty and the Beast back from your childhood. Airy Belle and unsociable Beast. However, it rarely comes to us that this fairytale is like a gorgeous metaphor of our life and everything that surrounds us. Especially in business, in terms of design. When it comes to redesigning a brand, entrepreneurs are eager to make their company’s new design look like Belle: the same beauty, freshness, kindness, and sophistication. However, when they get too obsessed with the redesign campaign, they can accidentally get the Beast instead. So, let’s see what makes redesign successful and what does not.
Redesign as a Beauty
Branding Magazine
The simpler, the better. Branding Magazine has got a redesign concept that looks just amazing. Lots of space, plenty of white and nothing odd – the new website makes it easier to breathe. This is what a good redesign is all about: to give a user more space that will lead him to a correct decision. Today, minimalism and lots of space have become two trends in web design that cannot be omitted – they justify all the expenses spent on the redesign.
Olive Garden
The rebranding campaign launched by Olive Garden has referred not only to their website redesign but also to changing their logo. The campaign has totally become successful. Firstly, because both their logo and website started looking exquisite and esthetical. Secondly, they tried to stick to one common style (which is no secret for any other brand) and chose an olive color to be a major one in all their pictures (which is a great achievement, for sticking to one general color scheme in everything is an extremely hard thing to do).
JoHo’s
Why do companies go for rebranding campaigns? There are a couple of reasons. The most possible one – they want to improve their sales and boost their income. How do they do a rebranding? Mostly, in a highly innovative way. However, there are only several examples of companies that succeeded in this innovative process. JoHo’s is one of them. Take a look at their website as an example of the best features that can be shown in a website design. The abundance of greenery (which, by the way, is a color of 2017 chosen by Pantone), brightness, colorfulness make you want to stay on this website for a really long time – and you don’t even feel this time flying by. If 1 website can change the reality, this website should definitely be JoHo’s!
Redesign as a Beast
You may be really impressed but LinkedIn takes the first place in terms of bad redesign examples that have appeared recently. The one and only reason is that it loses its initial idea of becoming a network for professionals. Instead, it started reminding a lot of Facebook – and it shouldn’t. The great idea about going for a redesign is preserving your own uniqueness; the moment you start following the most popular trends this uniqueness is gradually fading away.
AirBnB
It would be a stunning example of a clean and spacey redesign. But for one small detail in the upper corner of the website – its logo. The first time you see this logo you’ll probably start giggling. Not because you are a 13-year-old teenager – because it really looks like… well, you know what it looks like.
GamePost
Dark backgrounds are out of fashion but that is not what makes GamePost’s redesign so repelling. Either their webmaster doesn’t have any proper experience or their web designers decided to play joke on GamePost – the final result doesn’t look very well. The idea about hovers that show previews of games is great; the idea of combining these hovers with a black background and blue textuary is worse. The website looks heavy and a bit depressing. Perhaps, that is the reason their traffic has decreased considerably for the last couple of months.
Redesign as a…
It’s still hard to get used to Twitter that has gone for a redesign campaign. Their new design is really controversial and caused a tsunami of arguing on the Internet. Some say that round icons make the website look trendy and fashionable; others say the new design looks a lot like Facebook, that’s why Twitter has lost a significant part of its brand identity and corporate style. Nevertheless, the redesign has taken its place and we have to either deal with it or get dealt with it.
What about you? Do you like or hate the redesigns mentioned above? Share your thoughts in the comments!
