topic Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025 in Ask Me Anything and Panel Discussions

[Closed AMA] Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

jcolman — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:20:08 GMT

Curious about the visual changes in HubSpot's product? We know that a visual refresh can feel like a big shift, that's why we're creating a space for open conversation, transparency, and support to help you understand what's changing and why.

Join us for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) event from September 8–12 where Hayley Hughes, Product Design Director, and members of her design systems team will be on hand to answer your questions about the updated look and feel of our product.

You can try the new visual theme by opening your Account menu in HubSpot’s top navigation and selecting the “Switch to the new theme” link. Try using it for a few days so you can tell us how the new look and feel changes your product experience.

Learn more about HubSpot's new product look and feel from Mike Holzer, Head of UX and Executive VP at HubSpot.

This AMA is your chance to:

Get your questions answered directly by the people designing these changes
Understand the reasoning behind our design decisions
Learn about what's staying the same and what's evolving
Share your feedback and concerns with our design team
Discover the latest accessibility improvements and what’s coming next

We’ll discuss:

Why we’re making these changes and how you’ll benefit from them
What, specifically, is changing visually in the product and why
Our goals for these changes, such as improving accessibility
We’d especially like to hear your feedback! What’s working well for you and what’s not?

Drop your questions in the comments below and we'll get back to you between September 8–12. We're excited to connect with you and help you make the most of HubSpot's visual refresh.

— The HubSpot Design Systems Team

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

John — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:53:21 GMT

Would the product team be open to darkening the magenta on the top/sidebar?

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

TomM2 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:11:31 GMT

+1 for darkening the colour. I don't have any sight issues but am still finding the new layout immediately straining on my eyes to look at, it's actually quite hard to focus on anything.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

melindagreen — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:51:09 GMT

agree. the current shade of magenta makes the white font/icons actuallly look slightly pink, and there's a lot of visual flash to them on a high-res screen.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

Anton — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:45:33 GMT

+1 agree.
Would love to know why the decision felt on the red color.
Wouldn't green fit better with the overall new styling?

p.s. I'm not a huge fan of both new colors because of red-green color-blindness aspect. I'm thankfully not affected by this, but would love to know why the decision was made to go with the most unaccessible colors. Especially with the orange on green (like in different media like docs, website...)

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

JSmith55 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:41:57 GMT

Hi @jcolman 👋

Is the bigger goal with the new theme color going to be utilizing the account's brand colors and allowing them to customize their platform around their brand?!
We're testing the new, improved company and contact record layout, and love it. We helped sculpt the conditional options on all cards and sections. We're also testing out the flexible crm views betas and loving them! You're on the right path here.
Adding UI extensibility is a game-changer.
I'd love to know if there's going to be the ability to turn off menu items on the left by user views? It's getting overwhelming where a sales rep sees the Marketing tab at all. It would be nice to have in custom views the ability to manipulate the tabs on the left menu as well!

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:24:50 GMT

I agree! Maybe even give us a couple of colors to choose from?

Betreff: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:31:05 GMT

With the Index Pages now purely black and white, i think they look a little bit "washed out" now. I get that the reasoning behind it, but i feel like i need to concertrate more now to distinguish the elements because everything is now black/white.

If "congnitive load" is a big concideration, i am not getting why, at least on index pages, each company has its own logo present. Users with a lot of clients see a lot of small logos, but i would argue that most of them don´t recognize them anyways, so i would like to know what was the consideration to list the logos?

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:33:46 GMT

"It would be nice to have in custom views the ability to manipulate the tabs on the left menu as well! " - I second this, especially if cognitive load is a big part of the consideration.

It would also go well with the fact that Cards have the ability to be either shown/hidden based on certain conditions.

Betreff: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:35:25 GMT

Will there ever be a "Dark Mode" Version of HubSpot?

Betreff: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:45:14 GMT

I would like to know why the Reporting page has a light grey background color of #f0f0f0 (which looks a lot better in my opinion!) and others like Contacts or Companies don´t have that. Would the product team be open to give the use the ability to either a) stay with the old theme or b) give the user the ability to adjust the colors?

To be honest, i really dislike the color theme and i think it would not be a good move to "force" a big change like this on the user. I understand that a lot of users really love it ( i heard positive feedback at Inbound), but equally i am sure that i am not the only one who dislikes it.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

matt_scott — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:26:12 GMT

Firstly the redesign is great! most things have improved,

There are just a couple of things that I feel have lowered the user experience, (mainly down to minimizing background colours) See the screenshot where there are various module field groups, it just looks a bit messy with the lack of any sort of colour

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

SAFRavi — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:31:00 GMT

I don't really have a question, just wanted to throw in a comment that I think the new colour scheme is disgusting and it hurts my eyes and makes things harder to read. The clashing colours (magenta, orange, green, pink) is WILD.

I'm going to hold on to the classic theme as long as humanly possible, and if that's taken away I'm going to code my own Chrome extension to re-colour things to something much less offensive to the senses.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:23:37 GMT

Wow, thats some harsh criticism, not sure if that helps the product team though, maybe you can try to be a little bit more constructive? i mean, i have voiced my concerns as well below, but i try to do it in a way that helps the product team understand what it is that i am struggeling with.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:26:02 GMT

Indeed, the lack of colors even increases the cognitive load in an other area than before. While not that "noisy" or "loud" when it comes to many colors, now i have to do cognitive load to differentiate areas that was previoulsy clearly separated by colors. So i guess the congnitive load just shifted to a different area instead of going away.

Betreff: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

WMM_Inbound — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:29:49 GMT

I think, overall, giving the user a couple of "themes" or "color combinations" to choose from ( just live VS code has them) is the best approach, because then everyone can find a look and feel they like, nobody has to accept something they dont like and people with A11y issues can choose what they want. I mean, VS did not loose their brand identity because of these decisions.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

Anton — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:01:19 GMT

As somebody with a communication design background, I was shocked when I first switched to the "light theme beta".

To me it's unfortunatelly a huge step backwards from a designers perspective.

Im working on color-calibrated 32' IPS panels running on around 20% lightness and I can say that my whole office was lit up as I switched the theme in the evening.

After a few minutes my eyes began to hurt and I couldn't test/use it properly.
The immense amount of white and the absense of color besides the small side- and top bar is not really user-friendly imo.

Besides that, the old/current design is something that people got used to over the years.

I understand that making something for everybody is extermly hard. "Building for the next decade" and evolution in general is great, but the current design seems to be unfinished and - at least to me - not thought through.

The red/burgundy and green color mix seems not to be as timeless as the blue and orange.

More like a "let's make HubSpot more human-centric", but missing the fact that red-green color blindness is the most common color blindness type.

The Sprocket in combination with the red background the top left corner is barely visible because it's so tiny.

Sure - if you just go by numbers it's ok as it has a 4.68:1 accessibility factor and therefore meets the AA WCAG contrast ratio test, but in times when EAA(European Accessibility Act) and almost every designer&developer are trying to implement the greatest possible accessibility, 4.68:1 seems quite low and not very accessible imo.

For comparison - the blue tints with orange highlights are/were super easy to navigate and easy for the eye.

Yes, if you just look at the numbers, the contrast ratio was lower(3.22:1) but due the cold-warm contrast of blue and orange it was much more clear and easier to see.

The current hover colors of the navigation are barely visible and the focus state of the header & sidebar elements seems to be not implemented yet as it's just the browser default.

I'm sure the whole team put a lot of thoughts and work into this, and I don't want to go over every little piece here, but to me the design looks disconnected from the new brand(green) and heartless (almost no color variation, a huge amount of white, harsh system colors for statuses...)

Haven't tested it in depth, but it seems like the whole new thing is just a theme with different colors. No structural changes like implementing screenreader functionalities were made.

The implementation of new icons itself in something like the design manager are cool, as the "old" ones weren't that great, but the current implementation is super hard to the eye.

A slightly different topic but - I'm looking at the new marketplace right now. Each card is a div with nested divs and <a>-tags/links. Not very "designing for the next decade" imo.

I'd like to know:

Is the current state considerd more of a "90% done" or rather a "30%ish done"?
Is the brand disconnection (HubSpot website and dev docs are green, HubSpot "tool" is red, insights are yellowish) intended? If so, why?
Will users have the ability to choose from several themes (like others asked before)?
Since the marketplace was just relaunched, wouldn't semantic html tags have been possible? Like <figure>, <summary>...
Will there be accessibility features like "high contrast mode" font-size changes etc?
Will there be a real dark mode be implemented in the future?

best,

Anton

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

dsmarion — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:09:47 GMT

You said you would talk about:

"What, specifically, is changing visually in the product and why"

I would like to know the opposite. Please talk about the things under-the-hood that have changed because I read somewhere that this redesign sets up for what is still to come and that this is not just a color change. Can you elaborate on this?

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

VictoriaGumaer — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:36:51 GMT

Hi, JSmith. We are currently researching the ability to turn off menu items in the left navigating bar. If you'd like to chat and hear more about our plans you can feel free to book time with me here. We would love to get your feedback.

Re: Ask us anything about HubSpot's new product look and feel | September 8-12, 2025

jcolman — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:37:02 GMT

I appreciate you sharing this. We know the new look is a big shift, and not everyone finds our approach easy on the eyes. The changes were made to improve accessibility and create a clearer visual hierarchy, but we’re still learning. Can you tell me which areas of the product feel the most difficult to read? That will help us focus on the right improvements.