Facebook has unveiled its new corporate identity, which has been designed with branding consultants Saffron and typeface designers Dalton Maag.
Although the Facebook company and the Facebook app still share a name, they now have different logos.
The logo is now an uppercase wordmark. Facebook’s chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio wrote in a blog post that the updated logo’s “custom typography and capitalization” distinguishes the Facebook company from the Facebook app, whose branding will stay the same.
A moving image logo, which changes colour, also demonstrates the range of products which are part of Facebook’s growing network.
While it started as a social media company, Facebook now owns many technological services such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and its instant messaging app, Messenger.
“We started being clearer about the products that are part of Facebook years ago,” Lucio says. Over the summer, it began adding “from Facebook” within its family of apps, for example.
Over the coming weeks, Facebook will start using the new branding for their products and marketing, including a new company website.
Design details
The new logo was designed with “clarity and openness in mind”, according to a post on Facebook’s design site. “The generous spacing and open letterforms allow clarity at small sizes, and the subtle softening of corners and diagonals adds a sense of optimism,” it says.
In creating an “empathetic colour palette” which changes colour based on the individual brand, Facebook hopes to create a “clearer relationship” between its network of apps.
Facebook has also announced an updated art direction, with images that make the brand come to life “in the context of people, cultures, communities and relationships”.
The design team adds: “As the company continues to evolve, we hope this brand can help us better communicate the progress we’re making.”
Troubled times
The rebrand comes amid difficult times for Facebook.
Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg “should pay a price” for the social media company’s involvement in the 2016 US election.
In 2018, news broke that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had illegally used data from over 50 million Facebook users to target voters. This data was also used as part of Leave.EU’s Brexit campaign in 2016.
Facebook’s controversial virtual currency platform, Libra, which is supposed to launch next year, has also come under fire recently. It has lost 28 of its initial backers and faced criticism from multiple regulatory bodies, including the G7. Libra’s virtual wallet app, Calibra, was also the subject of a lawsuit from bank start-up Current.
What do you think of the new corporate identity? Let us know in the comments below.
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7 responses to “Facebook reveals new corporate identity”
Wow! It’s always super exciting to get a bit more info on the “Why” behind a rebrand, especially for a brand that is definitely labelled one of the most influential for our times. It’s quite hard to judge as there’s so much baggage attached to the previous logo! The mark is definitely well crafted and tells the current story of the business in a more unified way. I’m looking forward to see it being implemented across the touchpoints!
GENERIC
I think your comment illustrates a problem with this design in that it is not replacing the facebook application branding but is meant to act as an umbrella brand for all facebook products, so we now have a facebook umbrella brand and a facebook application brand, a bit confusing I think.
That’s gonna fit right in with the other High Street fashion outlets..!
I agree. I think perhaps a name change for the umbrella brand would’ve made more sense.
Not so much an identity, more a rather generic looking type FACElook! On a par with the new BT identity. No real character…excuse the pun.
“the subtle softening of corners and diagonals adds a sense of optimism”. Hmmm! It will be interesting to see how much of an impact on public perception the change will have if at all.