Instagram drops vintage camera logo for new minimal look

The social media platform has redesigned its branding and user interface, replacing its iconic brown, life-like camera symbol with a flat square icon that aims to better relate with the Instagram community.

Instagram_Logo

Instagram has undergone a redesign, which sees the social media platform replace its vintage camera icon for a more minimal symbol.

The refresh has been completed by Instagram’s in-house design team, and also includes a redesign of its partner apps Hyperlapse (a video recorder), Layout (an image collager) and Boomerang (a gif maker).

The new look aims to “unify’ all of the different apps with the same style, in line with how Instagram has developed as more than just a place to edit and share photos, says the app.

Instagram’s well-known previous logo was a life-like vintage camera with a rainbow mark – the new logo sees a cleaner, flatter symbol, which reimagines the rainbow as a gradient that seeps over the whole icon.

The camera shape is reimagined through a series of flat shapes: a soft square, with a circle and a dot contained within it, representing the lens and viewfinder of the camera. During the design process, the in-house team found the lens, viewfinder and rainbow were the most distinctive features of the original logo, after people were asked to draw it from memory.

Instagram_AppIconFamily

The system of icons for other apps includes a set of divided squares representing a composition of photos (Layout), an infinity symbol representing a video looping continuously (Boomerang) and a circle representing a video camera lense (Hyperlapse). All three use the same colour gradient as the Instagram icon.

The new logo hopes to represent “versatility” through its “modernised, simplified shape”, says Instagram, which aims to be better “reflective of the community” using it.

Instagram_UI

The user interface design of the app itself has also been simplified, says Instagram, to place “more focus” on users’ photos and videos.

“While the logo is a colourful doorway into the Instagram app, once inside, we believe the colour should come directly from the community’s photos and videos,” the company says.

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Comments
  • John Scarratt May 12, 2016 at 9:01 am

    Nice video, but it seems a bit desperate to justify the solution – “Look at all the process we went through!”

  • Anna Hingston May 12, 2016 at 10:27 am

    Interestingly my kids and their friends hate the change – looks like everything else now on my phone and can’t find it. They liked the Vintage look and felt it gave Instagram standout on the screen – they’ve swapped to Whats App for chatting and catching up!

  • Alex Brooks May 12, 2016 at 10:54 am

    Not a fan, they should’ve gone for the simplified logo at 00:45 secs, much better in my opinion. I do however like the cleaner interface.

  • James Anderson May 14, 2016 at 3:07 pm

    The actual white outline is nice, its just the horrid gradient that ruined it

  • Steve Raboin May 17, 2016 at 4:23 pm

    I actually like the new logo – especially the way it works across the family of logos. The new white UI is great, too. Check out my thoughts here: http://steveraboin.com/new_instagram_logo/

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