PAYPAL REDESIGN

What do you think of the recent PayPal redesign and the new PayPal branding? In my opinion, the new design is very unprofessional and lack consistency. My first reaction to the new PayPal design was "O did PayPal Got hacked!?" PayPal has made such a drastic change that it doesn’t even look or feel like PayPal (the PayPal that we used before). I think it will take us a while to adapt to the new design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying change is bad. Changes are good if the results are positive. Here are my thoughts on the new PayPal design…

PayPal logo redesign
Visually, there isn’t much change in the new logo. You can read the details on the logo redesign from the PayPal blog. UnderConsideration - Brand New also has an interesting article on how the new PayPal is created in simple 7 steps.
I find the old PayPal logo works very well on various backgrounds, where as the new logo doesn’t provide good contrast on color background. Let’s take a look the new and old PayPal logo on various background colors.

Why is this so important?
Don’t forget not all websites are using white background. What if the website’s backgound is the same color as the PayPal blue? Then, one of the word will be invisible (see image below).

Site Redesign
In general, I agree the new design look more cleaner. But, does it work? Not really…

Menu - CSS bug?
I’m not sure if it was intentional or a CSS bug. Take a closer look at the main menu, notice there is a 2px bottom margin

On some internal pages, the 2px margin disappeared. Bug or inconsistency?

Gradient login box
The metallic gradient inside the login box is very dark which created low contrast between the text and the background. People with low contrast or dim monitor will have problem reading the small text.

Web 1.0 arrows
The glossy menu is very Web 2.0, but these arrows and cut-corners are back to 1.0.

Why Flash?
At first I thought it was Javascript, then later I realized it is Flash. Why use Flash for that simple animation/transition when it could be done equally with Javascript? Couldn’t they do better animation with Flash?

Inconsistent stylesheets
Just click around the top level navigation, you will find there are two different stylesheets (one stylesheet uses Arial font, another one have Verdana font). For example, let’s take a look at the Financial Products and Request Money page:

In term of frontend pages, the PayPal site is quite small, so I’m very disappointed that they can’t even manage the stylesheets properly. It seems like PayPal is still using the old stylesheet on some of the pages.

Again, inconsistent search form:

Spam page?
Take a look at the Products & Services page, doesn’t it look like those parked domains filled with spam links (the middle portion)?


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