Today, Instagram announced a major “brand refresh,” which is essentially a fancy name for updating some marketing materials and making huge hand-wavy claims about logos. And there’s a lot of that here as well. But there’s one more significant change: Instagram designed its own typeface, Instagram Sans, which it expects to use extensively in the future, both in marketing and in the app.
Instagram Sans was inspired by the firm’s logo and “reflects the shape of the glyph and our devotion to simplicity and workmanship,” according to the company. (Hand-wavy, as I mentioned.) It’s largely inspired by the combination of squares and circles, or squircles as Instagram affectionately refers to them. It’s a mix of pixel-perfect and hand-made, with a few nuances like the not-quite-straight terminal at the bottom of the “t” that make it look more human, as Instagram has always sought to achieve. In some areas, you can trace the evolution from Instagram’s previous cursive logo.
The majority of the Instagram Sans fonts are simple sans-serif letters, which is appropriate for a company with such a large and diversified user base. Instagram said it collaborated with linguists to ensure the typeface is compatible with as many languages as possible, including script languages such as Thai and Japanese. Only a little hump in the tail of the letter “Q” in some fonts indicates that it is an unusual typeface. Then there’s the Sans Script, which adds broad brushstroke-y flourishes to almost every letter, sometimes to amazing effect (the uppercase “W” looks like the logo of an extremely hip yoga studio), and sometimes to bizarre effects (the lowercase “r” doesn’t even look like a letter).
The main question is how users will react to the new design. Meta understands how reluctant consumers can be to change better than anybody else.
