The new design, as I understand it, is looking to make the wallet more palatable to the every day user while incorporating a few features that have been talked about throughout the community (including on the hangouts) over the past several months.
For example, having a more detailed poll notification card on the overview tab of the wallet, bringing some of the RSA information, such as RR/day, onto the overview tab, and adding the ability to sort polls by "already voted," "new," and what not.
With regards to backpay, I think it's nice to show that if you spend hours upon hours building a tangible product that is then used to build additional products, you can be reimbursed. Not every proposal moving forward needs to reimburse the work it is built on, but since we did not pay for the rebranding effort put forward by joshoeah and the additional contributions by matt, I think that pairing some pay for them with this redesign is reasonable.