Instagram, the leading social media app for photos and videos, released a new logo today, along with an updated app design.
Rather than keep their 2007 logo with a beige Polaroid-esque camera with the rainbow in the top left, Instagram now has gone full rainbow with a magenta/orange gradient, and the outline of a camera in white. FastCoDesign unveiled the exclusive look earlier this morning, which was then followed up with a blog post on Instagram’s own website–including this video.
https://vimeo.com/166138104
According to FastCoDesign, Instagram has been working on the rebranding of their logo for over nine months. Nine months is a long time, so there’s a good chance that some of the scrapped logos and ideas were shown in that video.
Why Change The Logo?
The truth is that while Instagram’s logo was immediately recognizable, the company (as well as the industry itself) has undergone massive changes. They don’t just do photos, they do videos. They don’t just do :15 second videos, they do videos of varying lengths. They don’t just do square photos, they do original sized photos.
That doesn’t seem like a lot of change, but it is. But back to the new logo.
“It’s a lot closer to the cameras that people use these days,” explained Ian Spalter, Instagram’s head of design. From FastCoDesign:
Translating the outline of the old icon was simple enough, as was the camera lens itself—but there’s a subtle detail happening in what used to be the viewfinder. Instead of being another miniature black lens, it’s actually now just a white dot. When paired with the circle of the lens, the dot and circle evoke a smartphone’s lens and light sensor, rather than a Polaroid camera’s lens and viewfinder. Which is a shift that manages to quietly evoke how much photography has changed in the past decade or so.
Somewhere in there is the fact that Instagram realizes they’re up against Snapchat, an app that regularly updates itself and gives itself new life with the filters and features. The new Instagram app needs to pop off the screen, which is something that the magenta gradient does successfully.
Do we like it? Nope. Not one bit. And we’re not the only ones.
Reaction To Logo Change
guess i have to update my instagram tattoo
— Casey Neistat (@Casey) May 11, 2016
https://twitter.com/theandrearomano/status/730404533759815680
OH: "They took all the color out of the app and jammed it into the icon."
— Mike Rundle (@flyosity) May 11, 2016
https://twitter.com/erikinternet/status/730405589667463169
