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Instagram, the popular image-sharing social network owned byFacebookInc.,got rid of its vintage camera logo and redesigned its mobile apps with a simpler, whiter user interface.
The rebooted brand identity, rolled out to users on Tuesday, embraces the flat logos, gradient colors and minimalist design ethos that had been embraced byMicrosoft,Google and ultimately Apple, with the launch of iOS 7 in 2013.
Ian Spalter, the head of design at Instagram, said the new app icon—a simple white outline suggesting a camera against a gradient of pastel colors—is a distillation of the original.
“As a part of our process, we also asked people at the company to draw the Instagram icon from memory in 5 seconds,” Mr. Spaltersaid in a blog post. “Almost all of them drew the rainbow, lens and viewfinder.”
As for Instagram’s iOS and Android apps themselves, the interface changes are purely cosmetic. There are no new features or filters. Every button, menu and option is in the same place as before. The difference? The blue and black bars that made up Instagrams menus in the past are gone. Instead, there are plain white backgrounds, with minimalist black text and buttons.
Now more sparse, the interface is meant to allow shared content to stand out more. “We believe the color should come directly from the community’s photos and videos,” wrote Mr. Spalter. “We stripped the color and noise from surfaces where people’s content should take center stage.”
Users tend to be divided whenever redesign fever hits their favorite site or app, so it is no surprise that Instagram’s new stylehas caused a splitas well.
“It may well go down as one of the biggest design fails of the year,” Tim Nudd, the creative editor at Adweek magazine, wrote inhis assessment of the reboot. “It’s a very forgettable image that will get lost on people’s phones amid the thousands of other similarly uninspired designs of most tech apps. … Can we change it back?”
Calling the original Instagram logo “a modern-day classic,” Armin Vit,in the respected design blog Brand New, says the new icon will suffer for simply not being its predecessor. (After all,users regularly baked dessertsto look like it.) Still, Mr. Vit likes the new logo. “It has pleasant curves,” he wrote, “and I’ve rarely met a yellow-magenta-purple-blue gradient I didn’t like.”
AcrossTwitter,Facebook and of course Instagram itself, the jury is still out. The reaction from three users: “No, no, nooooooo. I’ll miss you, Instagram,” saidDalek.tardis; “The internals are better, but that icon needs to go,” wroteDreldn; “Ok i love it,” saidJohnyy.98.
Instagram isn’t the only popular name in tech to polarize users with a new look. A recent string of big tech names—Uber, Airbnb and evenGoogleamong them—have changed up their app icons and tweaked their interfaces, leaving good chunks of their users unhappy. So far, none of these companies have changed it back.
(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
