Pretty Much Everyone Hates the New Target.com Redesign

This holiday season, there's one thing everyone's sure to be getting on Target.com: a headache.

The recently relaunched Target site is sparking quite a bit of backlash from the design community, primarily due to the site's abundance of drop shadows and overall cluttered-as-crap vibe. The new look definitely puts a lot more product on the home page, but it sacrifices that minimalist "Target look" that the brand has spent so many years perfecting. 

While the previous site design also had its critics, this one seems to be beloved by almost no one. Check out a pretty accurate cross-section of recent tweets:

trainwreck redesign of the year: http://t.co/Mp32Vj2F14— Jim Silverman (@jimesilverman) November 22, 2013

Oh god, what happened to http://t.co/sZuxKbsoC4? — Evan Stremke (@EvanStremke) November 22, 2013

I don’t know why everyone’s so up in arms about http://t.co/wvIyaS7iWP when http://t.co/ifdVA6cWMD is still out there. — Jay Fanelli (@fanelli) November 22, 2013

“SHOP UNTIL YOU DROP (SHADOW)” – http://t.co/QCGllT0WfO— Maxim Leyzerovich (@DUQE) November 22, 2013

Which one of you monsters did this to http://t.co/kTdrOvuzIk?? SHOW YOURSELF
— John Williams (@johnwilliams713) November 22, 2013

A moment of silence for all those shadows dropped on http://t.co/QCGllT0WfO
— Maxim Leyzerovich (@DUQE) November 22, 2013

.@Target.com, are you feeling okay? http://t.co/wPHaFo2t58— Kelsey Gullickson (@CMYKelsey) November 22, 2013

Drop shadow porn —> http://t.co/RjWhpgcROh— Oykun (@oykun) November 22, 2013

This site looks hacked, http://t.co/AxvRPyIm7f— Antonia Anni (@Tonianni) November 22, 2013

Looks like someone at @Target is having way too much fun with drop shadows. http://t.co/In14jWd3Ie— jasoncarulli (@jasoncarulli) November 22, 2013

Holy drop shadow. @Target is bringing back the middle ages of web design: http://t.co/C24huFHEMV— Kelly Clawson (@kellyclaws) November 22, 2013

http://t.co/sgxS5QsZA4 re-imagined as a MySpace/Geocities mashup. A drop shadow for you. And you. AND YOU!!!!!!!!! — Gary Love (@nemejo) November 21, 2013

This was about as close as we could find to people defending the redesign:

Willing to bet the average consumer doesn't care what http://t.co/VvxWdDoZ8l looks like. — Dan DeLauro (@dandelauro) November 22, 2013

And this guy, who (for the first time in my life) I hope is trolling.

The new http://t.co/4uAIrrNez1 looks really good - congrats to their design team.

 

— Zander Brade (@zancler) November 22, 2013

UPDATE: Some on Twitter have suggested that Olson might have been behind the redesign, but agency VP Jeremy Mullman says it wasn't them. "While Olson does a great deal of digital work for Target," Mullman writes in an email to AdFreak, "we did not manage or work on the Target.com redesign." Mullman said he was unsure who had created the new design.

We've reached out to Target for clarification.