In case you didn’t notice, we changed the MailChimp login page a little just before Fathers Day…

The new default login page design looks like this:

Which is nice, but nothing all that special. The real nice part is it’s now much easier to swap out the graphic whenever holidays roll around.

Like Fathers Day:

Some fathers actually wrote in to us yesterday when they noticed the new design. I myself had no idea this was being launched, so it was a nice surprise for me. Got a real chuckle out of little Freddie in “daddy’s” arms.

How we got to this design

In the past, we’ve always modified our MailChimp logo for the holidays.

Kinda like how Google does it (here’s their Father’s Day logo from yesterday):

But in the past, our little chimpy mascot was a lot easier to modify. Here’s a collection of different versions of the chimp we’ve used:

Um, the one in the center, where he’s all vicious, was only used internally. Our dashboard used to switch over to that chimp whenever we hit new revenue records. Which, back then, meant we’d be going out for a big steak dinner to celebrate.

Anyhoo…

Something changed after we got the chimp re-designed by Jon Hicks (here’s the story of that redesign). We found him a lot harder to modify for the holidays. Mostly because nobody wanted to touch Jon’s awesome work. It just felt sacrilegious. We tried doing some illustrative styled login pages, but even though we’ve got the most talented designers on the planet, it’s just way too much work to match the depth and detail from the new logo every time there’s a holiday (around the globe).

So we decided to get our photochop on (check out Worth1000, who hosts daily PhotoChop contests). Much, much easier to superimpose the chimp on top of a photo. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s funny, and it’s challenging all at the same time. Speaking of challenges, this format makes it really easy to post user-submitted login screens too (ahem, hint hint wink wink).