Instagram's New Wordmark Couldn't Be a Better Metaphor for Tech
Instagram has a new logo wordmark. The new design was announced by Adam Mosseri —father of three boys, married to an amazing woman and, aw shucks, yeah, now that you mention it, head of Instagram —on his own account yesterday. Mosseri’s post described the revision as “cleaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.” And boy, do people hate it. I mean, where to begin? The most obvious place to start is with the glyph for the letter “r,” which looks like no lower case “r” that has ever existed before nor —if there is any mercy left in the world— any that will ever exist again. (It does, however, look strikingly like the lower case Greek letter τ; perhaps this is the Greek alphabet’s belated revenge for the inexplicable abuse it’s suffered at the hands of American fraternities and sororities over the years.) Beyond the genuinely mystifying “r”, there’s so, so much else at which to shake one’s head here. There’s the jarring mixture of cursive and printing; the inexplicably jaunty little angled stroke at the top of the “I”; the rag-tag mixture of stroke weights; the fact that the “g” looks like the “a” with a nasty infection; and a million other things that I probably haven’t even noticed but are giving professional typographers aneurysms as we speak.
Ultimately, though, all those things are stylistic choices. They’re bad ones, to be clear—but they’re superficial. I’d argue that the real problem with the new wordmark is more fundamental and conceptual than those weird pieces of, um, design. The old wordmark is, at its most basic level, meant to recall human handwriting. It doesn’t actually look like handwriting, obviously, but that’s ultimately what these sorts of typefaces are often meant to evoke—a sort of folksy, hands-on charm. Instagram: it’s photography, it’s DIY, its name is written in a script font. You don’t have to like it, but there’s at least some measure of conceptual coherency to it.
The new version takes the old and… You know that thing that Preview (and no doubt Windows equivalents) does when you’re circling something on a document? When it “fixes” the rough, all-too-human scrawl you’ve added by converting it into a perfect ellipse? I guess there’s someone out there who doesn’t hit Cmd-Z as soon as this happens, and maybe they’re the same person who came up with this idea, because it’s essentially the same thing, but applied to a gazillion-dollar company’s branding. It takes something designed to evoke a feeling of humanity and… removes the feeling of humanity. It makes no sense…f … …but then, the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. For all Meta’s hilarious wait-are-we-the-bad-guys? energy, I can’t imagine that they set out here to arrive on a nice typographical embodiment of everything that big tech doesn’t understand about people. But that’s where they’ve landed: a wordmark takes the basic shapes of its predecessor’s glyphs and drains the last vestiges of anything remotely human from them. What’s left? Just the shapes themselves: cold, empty, hollow, nigh on illegible —and, if you look at them long enough, you see what’s really going on: they’re devolving slowly into the same typeface used for the Meta corporate wordmark.
Why yes, folks, it is a big metaphor for AI/enshittification/everything else: the internet, what should have been humanity’s greatest creation, just without the humans. If you want a picture of the future, imagine the color beige stamping on a human face—forever.
