Western Digital redesigns My Passport drives, rhymes with Jawbone's look

Western Digital has redesigned its My Passport line of personal hard drives with a look that rhymes with Jawbone's Jambox products. The connection between the Jawbone and Western Digital lines is industrial design firm fuseproject.

The storage company said it wanted its My Passport hard drives to be more personal and connect users to their devices.

On its site, fuseproject illustrated how the My Passport devices were rethought with the help of interviews and workshops with heavy data users around the world.

Western Digital said in a statement that it was looking "to engage consumers in a conversation about how storage is core to their lives and how they feel more empowered by the real benefits of capturing, protecting and enjoying life's precious memories."

From there, fuseproject focused on the product design. It noted:

With a design split in two parts we are expressing the tension between a personal and tactile object, and the seriousness of quality storage technology. The base is a beautiful, textured foundation while the top expresses a clean and minimal surface. These two parts meet halfway in a detail we call 'Lifeline,' the hidden intersection of these two separate worlds. Your eye is drawn immediately from the edges to the product's center. We've also selected a brighter, stronger color palette to make the products more personal, and to create a stark contrast from the traditional blacks and blues in the space. This new design approach is representing physically, functionally and metaphorically the ideas in which the brand lives.

Fuseproject's take is pretty deep. After all, I thought Jambox right away.

The specs for the My Passport line include password protection, encryption and up to 4TB capacity. There's also a My Passport line for the Mac. Western Digital's My Book desktop hard drive will have the new look and up to 8TB capacity.