Instagram has updated its app icon and user-interface design. The new version, says head of design Ian Spalter, is the result of “starting with the basics, removed ornamentation, and flattened the icon.” The new logo is a square-shaped evocation of a camera, with neon rainbow colros that fan out across it. The project has also included a redesigned the user interface to be something simple and clean “so that people’s posts are the focus in the app.” This included stripping the color and noise from surfaces where people’s content goes. The Facebook-owned company’s family of apps — Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse — also have been given a unified look. The gradient is carried through each icon, and they are on the same grid to make the system feel cohesive.
To put the changes in contest, Spalter notes that the Instagram community has evolved over the past five years from a place to share filtered photos to so much more — a global community sharing more than 80 million photos and videos everyday, “our updated look reflects how vibrant and diverse your storytelling has become.” As might be expected, the new logo has generated impassioned critiques, with the mood captured nicely in The Great Instagram Logo Freakout of 2016 and in Love It Or Hate It, Instagram’s New Logo Is So Internet Right Now.
