Instagram has long solidified it’s claim as the best photo sharing social media platform on the market, dethroning Facebook (Well, before being acquired by them anyway). And in classic fashion, Instagram has undergone another ‘visual refresh’, with a new, brighter icon, new typography and full-screen marketing layouts.
The new Instagram logo has not strayed too far away from the previous one, being just slightly more vibrant and brighter. In a blog post, Instgram shared their vision with the new logo, saying “Our vibrant gradient was reimagined using an innovative 3D modeling process to make it feel illuminated and alive. The Instagram gradient, made up of our brand colors, is the foundation of our complete color system. Through illumination, the gradient signals moments of discovery in our marketing, logo and even in-app as seen in Create mode, stickers and Instagram Story rings.”
The company is calling it’s new typeface ‘Instagram Sans’. Instagram have apparently designed this new font with inspiration from their logo, to reflect the platform’s heritage. Instagram’s logo is essentially two circles engulfed by a square (with rounded edges) to form a minimalistic camera, and hence the typeface has drawn inspiration from squares and circles, or a more millenial-friendly “squircles”. The font has been introduced in regular, bold, light, medium, condensed and condensed bold forms, and is available for user testing here.
“While designing this new typeface, our goal was to make Instagram Sans globally accessible. We partnered with language experts around the world to adapt the typeface to global scripts including Arabic, Thai and Japanese. We want to support all of our creators and community members who push culture forward to express themselves fully in any language they choose,” Instagram said in their blog post.
Finally, as the last part of this visual refresh, Instagram is transitioning towards a full-screen layout for the home feed, in a bid to create a more ‘immersive’ (translation – TikTok like) experience on the feed. This will be impacting photos posted on user’s profiles, and is expected to stir up some backlash (People work hard on how their profile looks). What this hasn’t affected though, is the bottom navigation bar to switch between feed, reels, discover page and the user’s own profile.
Instagram has been rather pro-active this year, with multiple changes coming in quick succession. Recently, the platform addressed the users’ aversion to an algorithm-generated sequence of posts on their feed, giving them more control on how they consume content. Reports of Instagram supporting NFTs have also been surfacing.
