Introduce Instagram”Brand updateToday, it’s mostly a fancy term for updating some marketing materials and making hand-written phrases around logos. And there’s a lot of that here too. (Can I get you? A long digression about luminous gradients?) But there is also a much bigger change: Instagram Created her own characternamed Instagram Sans, which it plans to use widely to move forward with both marketing and the app itself.
The company said Instagram Sans is inspired by the Instagram logo, and “reflects the look of the avatar and our commitment to simplicity and craftsmanship.” (Like I said, it’s hand-wavy.) It’s inspired in large part by a mixture of squares and circles, or as Instagram lovingly calls them, squares. And as Instagram has always tried to do, it’s pixel perfect and handcrafted with a few details, like the not quite straight tip below the “t”, which makes it look more human. In some places, you can see the evolution from the cursive logo that Instagram has used for years.
Most Instagram Sans fonts are fairly simple and straightforward characters, which makes sense for a brand with a global and diverse group of users. Instagram said it worked with linguists to make sure the font works in as many languages as possible, including text languages like Thai and Japanese. In some fonts, there is a small hump in the tail of the capital letter “Q” indicating that it is an unusual font. But there’s also the Instagram Sans Script, which adds a wide brush stroke boom to just about every letter, sometimes to great effect (the uppercase ‘W’ looks like a super hip yoga studio logo) and sometimes with very weird results (the lowercase ‘r’ even looks like a letter ).
However, what Instagram’s more unusual fonts give it a more distinct identity. One of the places the company hopes users will try on Instagram Sans is Stories and Reels, where captions written in Sans Script will not look like a ripped TikTok video. When vertical video becomes the norm, a certain similarity permeates the social landscape, and while the unnecessarily undulating “x” might not change everything, it is.
However, the real question is how users will feel about the new look. Meta knows better than anyone how resistant users are to change; Remember all the “10,000 against the new Facebook!” groups? This may be the reason why Instagram started small rather than fixing everything about the entire app on day one. But don’t be surprised if you see corners starting to pop up in more places before you know it.
“Web specialist. Lifelong zombie maven. Coffee ninja. Hipster-friendly analyst.”
