
Refreshing Plaid's brand - charleyma
https://blog.plaid.com/refreshing-plaids-brand/
======
faitswulff
I saw an article about how a 21 year old brand logo (Lao Gan Ma 老干妈 chili
sauce) became a fashion icon[0] for Chinese Fashion Week and wondered what the
Western world would be like if companies didn't rebrand so often. The Lao Gan
Ma logo certainly wouldn't have the same cachet if it was a 2 year old logo
that looked nothing like the original[1].

Is it possible to make brands (or software) that's just "done?"

[0]: [http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002903/face-of-chinese-
chili-...](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002903/face-of-chinese-chili-sauce-
becomes-fashion-symbol-in-new-york)

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9ewvb7/firefox_log...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9ewvb7/firefox_logo_concept_by_mark_forge/)

~~~
oh_sigh
Notably the brand is for a chili and condiment company. In that field,
recalling nostalgia and your grandma's recipes makes sense. But no one wants
to use their grandma's old software

~~~
faitswulff
> But no one wants to use their grandma's old software

Maybe that will change as the industry matures.

~~~
jjoonathan
emacs

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matchbok
Why do sites continue to use the hamburger menu??? (and also hide the menu if
we don't decide to allocate 1200px of real estate to basically empty
website!?)

Such a bad UX for discoverability.

Here's what I see:

[https://imgur.com/a/COfKBYM](https://imgur.com/a/COfKBYM)

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pragone
I'm confused - what's the problem with the hamburger menu? What would the
alternative be on small screens?

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matchbok
It seems to trigger even on non-mobile devices. If I shrink my viewport to a
normal width (900ish pixels) the entire site is basically unusable. :/

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mdorazio
900px is not normal - that's tiny by today's standards. The only plausible
alternative at a width that small would be to shrink the size of the text in
the menu, otherwise it simply won't fit. Doing that would be worse to me for
usability than switching to the hamburger.

~~~
runako
> 900px is not normal - that's tiny by today's standards.

Wait what? That's tiny for a screen, but not for a (resizable!) browser
window. Here's a shout-out for folks like me who run browser windows side-by-
side.

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mdorazio
Side-by-side windows are simply not used by normal users, which the vast
majority of websites are designed for. The real question here is why don't you
have a second monitor?

~~~
huebomont
uhh most users don't have a second monitor. and you don't just design for
"most." quite a lazy mindset around here.

~~~
mdorazio
The mindset around here is "everyone should design things for my extremely
specific use case that 99% of users don't share". Find me stats about the % of
users with desktop browser windows narrower than 900px and then we can talk.

~~~
marssaxman
The mindset around here is "everyone should stop overdesigning their sites so
that they only work for people in the peak of the bell curve and needlessly
exclude all the less-common use cases, of which mine is an example".

The web works better when site designers try to exert less control over it.
Who are you to tell me how wide my browser window should be?

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Artemis2
I learned a new word today!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloché](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloché)

~~~
teddyh
See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knurling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knurling)

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maliman33
@charleyma, why does the company go with that vector art style that _every_
website has these days? It is no longer unique or recognizable.

It looks cool, and management is probably going to be super happy. But that's
not what a brand is about. It should be identifiable and recognizable. This
does nothing of that.

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scottrogers86
Congrats -- you now look like every other company in the fintech space.

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jamestimmins
Is it just me or is the light-blue link color very hard to read against a
white background?

