When you open an app on your mobile phone or tablet, you do so by looking for and gently tapping on its icon. If you use a given app frequently, it can be disorienting to have its icon change. Today Instagram, the super-popular app that you use to browse photos of your friends’ brunches, their cats, and their cats’ brunches, changed their logo and app icon. They took a lot of care to make sure that the design is fresh, but familiar enough that it’s instantly recognizable.
This process took the company’s design team nine months, indicating that they put a lot more thought into it than slapping a word on a blue square and calling it a day, unlike Gap’s 2010 MS Paint job of a logo. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, has been using pretty much the same logo and app icon since 2010, and it had a few problems: other apps’ icons have evolved to be simpler and flatter. More importantly, cameras look different now.
Instagram only runs on phones, yet the old icon evoked a vintage Polaroid camera. The connection between Polaroids — the first time people were able to take pictures and share them instantly — and Instagram is tenuous if you don’t remember what life was like before digital cameras, or, for the youngest users of the app, what life was like before everyone carried around phones with cameras in them.
In this video, posted (where else?) on Instagram’s Instagram, they show the design process.
The white dot on the upper right could be a viewfinder, if you’re old, or it could be the LED flash of a camera phone. The new icon represents all cameras.
Well, if nothing else, the parody Twitter account for the 2010 Gap logo approves, and that’s what really matters for major design changes.
An Exclusive Look At Instagram’s New App Icon [Fast Company Design]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist