Instagram Unveils Dramatically Different Logo, Revamped User Interface

Gone is Instagram’s beloved brown camera. And in its stead, the Facebook-owned photo and video-sharing company introduced today a drastically pared-down app icon. It features vivid shades of purple and orange accented by the familiar outline of a camera face in white.

“The Instagram icon and design was beginning to feel, well… not reflective of the community,” writes the company’s head of design, Ian Spalter, “and we thought we could make it better.” He describes his team’s process in a Medium post, which also notes how Instagram updated the icons for companion apps Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse in a similar fashion.

The team sought, Spalter describes, to modernize the previous logo’s most recognizable features — including the rainbow accent, lens, and viewfinder — into something less literal.

In addition to the outer facelift, Instagram did some fine-tuning with respect to its internal workings as well. While blue text and orange notifications proliferated throughout the previous version of the app, an updated user interface features black text and red notifications. “We stripped the color and noise from surfaces where people’s content should take center stage,” Spalter describes. The icons within the app have also been rejiggered in a way that feels native to both Android and iOS, respectively.

“Our hope is that people will see this [redesign] as a new creative spark ,” Spalter says, “something to have fun with and make their own.” Check out a video describing why the company — where users post 80 million photos and videos every day — sought a whole new look below: