New branding feedback

Not that anyone, or at least anyone who makes these decisions, is likely to care, but thought I’d throw out that everyone here really dislikes the rebrand. We’re not fans of the color at all, and also greatly prefer the old logo/favicon. Also, personally I find that giant face image on the home page to be terrible, unwelcoming and uninformative. It certainly wouldn’t make me excited to scroll down and learn more.

Please don’t re-color the web gui or mobile app that ugly orange color. The current color scheme is much easier on the eyes.

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Do not mind it too much. Not to my taste but appreciate the direction. Like the stylised word logo rather than the octopus and the new ticket interface that is coming seemed like a good colour scheme. They mentioned in the webinar that the orange would be a lightly used accent colour.

For the favicon I would prefer the forum icon to be touched up to look slightly different to make it easier to pick out.

I kinda like it, its like Steam Punk Salvador Dali. It emulates a lot of security platform branding nowadays which makes it kinda feel a bit more serious and modern.

The new ticket interface looks more modem and functional and I am looking forward to the Views menu. Its not going to be all Orange if that what worries you.

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This is not going to be the most polite response, coming as it is from a somewhat visceral reaction, but I HATE it!

At first I thought the favicon in my browser was just a logo for some publishing site I didn’t remember navigating to. The S just looks slouched and way too relaxed. Lazy, even. Color is… fine? Though it struck me as more leather-bound book than brick red if they are trying to go for the whole “building blocks” theme. Again, the kind of color palate I’d associate with a publisher, maybe a money manager, more so than anything remotely modern.

Worse yet, I see syncro has gone down the path of a boring word mark only logo that makes it look indistinguishable from every other tech company who did the same thing in the past 5-7 years. UGH! Boring! I am particularly peevish about the choice to use a font that has disconnected and disjointed letter forms… this visually communicates the exact OPPOSITE of what syncro is supposed to be - a platform that ties lots of things together! The octopus was a perfect representation how many of us MSP owners/consultants/account managers/customer service specialists/technical specialists/HR managers/CIO/CFO/CEOs have to have all our arms coordinated and working together.

I was told in chat that “Eight, our former octopus mascot was released back into the ocean to earn some nice rest.” and after they JUST did a beautiful redesign and put Eight on the newest app as well! COME BACK, EIGHT! WE STILL HAVE WORK TO DO, SYSTEMS TO MONITOR, TICKETS TO CLOSE, INVOICES TO PROCESS!

Hudu did a rebrand recently and went from a script to a sanserif font, a slightly different shade of purple and replaced the magic wand with a rabbit head - at least they kept a sense of thematic continuity. Atera ditched it’s funky space scape theme and green color in favor of hot-pink, but turned a triangle in a square into triangles within triangles and made the word mark even more stylized and echoing their old retro-modern space theme.

Syncro, on the other hand, decided to just flip over the pieces, board, and table. Aside from the uninspired font-choice-as-brand-identity move, the whole site wide change looks like someone prompted DALL-E with “show me paintings from Magritte’s iron oxide period.” Is this REALLY the impression you want to communicate either to your customers or your customers’ customers?



I’m sure we all have had enough surreal unreality to deal with in the world that they don’t have to push it in our faces! Lots of indie games I can go play if that’s what I’m looking for.

I realize they probably paid a lot of money for this to some outside marketing agency, but someone on the executive team just needs to hit the Undo arrow on the whole thing. No sense in continuing to throw good money after bad in trying to make this look better. And it’s going to look a LOT worse as time goes on and the novelty fades. Moreover, this branding exercise squanders years of previous investment in brand building since it does not tie in AT ALL with the company brand evolution over time.

Hopefully Syncro will NOT aspire to be like Microsoft and be constantly confusing their brands in the marketplace by changing names, colors, icons, or even entire control sets to random parts of the platform just to then move them back later in the name of giving the marketing department something to do to. But even Microsoft is still represented by a Window! Can you imagine if Apple ditched the apple logo? Even P&G got their moon back - satanic panic be damned!

ICONIC BRANDS HAVE ICONS!

I see some responses that seem to be conflating the good directions they are going with UI/UX design in the tools we interact with every day with the branding changes. These are two different things. Indeed, even the preview (and current) system still uses the original color palate. Heck, if they wanted give us the ability to select color palates that are more in line with our own branding for end-user-portal purposes that would be welcome, but it doesn’t have to be tied their brand identity. Syncro can be plain, but functional on the backend regardless of whether they want to identify themselves to the customer on their web site with either ocean blue or s**t brown.

Just my $.02. Had to get it off my chest. Back to work.

KW

8 Likes

As a web developer, I would also like to provide some constructive feedback for the UI team on the new syncromsp.com homepage.

  • The orange color is very harsh and the image of the face is actually quite busy and distracting for a hero image. It’s overwhelming.
  • Your new white logo in the header is completely washed away with the orange and overall busyness of the background image. I actually didn’t notice the logo until I scrolled down and your sticky header kicked in with the black logo/white background.

Perhaps a background overlay on the image with 50% - 70% transparency would help tone it down, or at least if applied to your header (header.desktop-header-template-part), the logo would be more noticeable.

4 Likes

I really dislike the change. The orange/red colour background with an asymmetrical S makes the Icon look wonky. Visually, the S looks like it is not straight. It looks unstable. Like its going to fall over or its struggling to stay upright. It looks kind of childish, like a kindergarten kid drew it in crayon. Its not an Icon that’s fit to be associated with this product. Sorry to be so harsh. Do you dislike Octopuses?

Can you make it an option to reenable the old colour scheme please. A RMM /PSA system should be in cool restful colours in my opinion. Its hard enough to stay focused slaying tickets all day and will be more so with all the tabs lit up with red Icons. Too much visual distraction!

I am all for rebranding if thats what you want to do, but the super distracting Icon on every tab open is too much.

image

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I try not to be too harsh, but I’m not a big fan of it either. The new branding makes me feel, ‘off’. Like, I have an odd uneasy feeling when looking at it. I subconsciously think the logo in the browser tabs is some weird obscure blog I found when trying to fix a problem.

I’d also be hesitant to show any sort of Syncro marketing to customer new and old. It doesn’t instill confidence in me, and probably wouldn’t for my customers. I am happy that the taskbar icon on user devices is our custom logo.

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It’s like someone prompted AI to generate “Kafka nightmare in orange”. It looks like if Hieronymus Bosch had networking problems. Like the book jackets for 1984 and Dune came to life one day, and had baby together, and that baby grew up to own and operate an MSP. Is everything okay over there?

I 100% would not have pushed for our compnay to use your platform if this was your branding when I did so. If your software is developed the way this branding and webpage was developed, I dont want to think about it.

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I was told in chat that “Eight, our former octopus mascot was released back into the ocean to earn some nice rest.”

LIES!

I went looking for the post announcing the refreshed brand from September 2022 and found this:

Oh! Eight! What have they DONE to you!?

Strangely enough, I noticed that rather than just Love responses on this thread I can also “octo love” responses. I guess when they figure out some of the original branding is lurking in a corner of the web site they will replace those with half-heads or disembodied eyeballs or mecha-eight the ravenous cyborg squid of the void…

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I had trouble finding my favicon in favorites, and tabs. I’m like I’m sure I had several pages open. Uggg! Blood Red for a colour scheme??? Eight where are you were my real hero!. Bring back eight favicon with the Machine Type logo, get rid of the red. I don’t want to see red when I work.

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I think this is a vegan conspiracy to ban Octopuses !

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Completely agree, and I’m a life long designer all about rebrand and keeping things fresh. Maybe someone in charge wanted to change the color, sure, but this color is terrible imho as well. Also imho the complete shift from the syncro logo so quick was a bit haste, maybe someone decided a octopus was a goofy idea, and hated it, but personally think it would have been better idea to just logo/modernize the iconography as opposed to full trash can. so switch. This isn’t X in a need a hard shift branding making a cultural statement, or at least not to my knowledge it isn’t at syncro haha.

Also to note, I really hope to never find out how much money and time was spent on the branding redesign as opposed to allocating that money to making the mobile app actually usable… That’s a bit miss for me. Also, I know business is about making money, and growing to make more money, but rebrands always terrify existing clients that there is some new board decisions being made that are one corner away from jack the price and rob current clients instead of having a better marketing sales and acquisition strategy… Sure hope we aren’t one corner away from leaving the roots of syncro business functions!

Cheers.

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It’s almost like the designer management allowed to make this has no clue what they’re doing so they didn’t research the IT industry at all with color palettes and are completely ignorant to what this color stands for in the industry… Then I will shy from name calling to the management that approved this… lol.

PS why wasn’t there a big fun community vote on design skew options? Would have been fun and better feedback to help shape teh rebrand yea? Did I miss this? lol

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Absolutely. No option, it should be canceled and rolled back. This is a design from some zellenial designer team that thinks they’re edgy, or it’s from some non professional that watched a bunch of design content.

I agree the new main logo as an asymmetrical S is silly af. Logos are to be iconic, not a drunk S instilling NOT professional, NOT well formed, IT business software. The management AND the designer on this need to watch more Chris Do…

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It looks fine, but the favicon throws me off. My brain is trained to recognize the old color and icon. I keep scanning my bookmark menu bar, searching for the Syncro link that’s right in front of me… lol.

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Here is the Copilot take on that:

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Am I the only one that likes orange or something? I mainly use dark mode so the orange on black doesn’t looks half bad.

Part of the rebrand is OK in my opinion, but honestly, yeah, that face on the homepage is just plain creepy and scary. It says nothing at all to me about what Syncro does or is and does not encourage me to start exploring the site. Looks more like a creepy movie poster I would not choose to watch. Almost as bad as what Jaguar recently did with their re-branding. Makes me think someone in the C-suite let their 17 year old favorite nephew that plays a lot of Xbox design it. Just plain bad.

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I cannot stand it either. The color is terrible. I don’t mind the old as it is much easier on the eyes.
It would be nice to have an option so users could change the web gui to the color of their liking.

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Seriously has zero impact on me or my business … however I do like the orange