Thoughts on the new Instagram logo (2024)

The old Instagram logo has always been the runt of my home screen.

I wouldn’t say that I hated it, but when it sat side by side with the other apps on my iPhone, it just looked outdated. Being stuck in skeuomorph-land, it didn’t match well with the modern flat style of my other icons.

We all knew it would be updated at some point and I was secretly looking forward to seeing what they would come up with. I have to say I’m impressed with the update, and I think it’s my favorite home screen icon at the moment (if such a thing exists).

The new Layout, Hyperlapse, and Boomerang icons for me are “okay” — they capture the new identity well, although they don’t stand out for me as much as the primary logo, especially as so many app icons on the iPhone already have a white background. But they’re infinitely better than the old ones!

The first thing that struck me about the new logo was the amazing color choice. It’s bright and vibrant where the old logo was dull by comparison.

It stands out. The concentric shapes in the new icon give it a depth that I don’t see in many others. It almost feels a bit 3D at a quick glance, and it’s definitely popping out at me a little bit more than the other icons on my home screen.

I can almost imagine it being a tunnel, sucking me into the app.

I love the rainbow gradient background that pays homage to the rainbow stripes of the old logo.

I haven’t seen this type of gradient used very often in app icons and I’m not sure why — it works really well. I’m predicting that tons of apps in the near future will be doing variations on this. We’re gonna have multi-colored gradients everywhere. I know some apps already do, but now it’s a trend :)

I’m so happy they chose to go with (primarily) shades of purple and pink. There’s too many blue and green icons on my home screen and this is a nice change. Instagram have just brightened up millions of home screens around the world, which may help to make the world a little happier.

Apparently Instagram’s head of design, Ian Spalter, said that the new icon’s gradient “looks like the sunset picture that everyone’s trying to take.”

Something that I think will bother some people is the corner contours of the “squircle.”

The spacing between the squircle and the app icon itself feels odd, because the squircle doesn’t follow the same contour line as the default iPhone app icon shape.

The rainbow gradient makes this effect more pronounced, because the brighter (yellow) area at the bottom-left makes that part of the logo seem more “spacious” than the darker area at the top-right. This gives the illusion that the contour spacing at the top seems “tighter” than at the bottom — almost imbalanced.

But then, it’s unfair to expect Instagram’s designers to stick to Apple’s default icon contour, just because they happened to choose a shape-inside-a-shape design. Technically, the inner glyph has nothing to do with the particular shape of the Apple icon. Other apps don’t care? Look at Snapchat or Medium.

Yet it has a lot to do with it, because we’re talking about design. And with this particular design people will just expect the Instagram squircle to have the same corner radius as the Apple app icon, and some people will be bothered by the spacing.

I really love the new logo, and I think Instagram did an amazing job. To me it perfectly captures what the app is all about while still retaining the essence of the original.

Their designers could have easily just taken the old logo and flattened it (I believe they did try this) but I’m glad they decided to go further down the design path and be more bold with it.

Now if only we could get a new YouTube icon - why is it not as bold and impressive as the Flipboard or Quora icons?

And I think it’s time we killed the pentagram-like App Store icon whose design elements make no sense on so many levels. And the Facebook Pages “capture the flag” icon while we’re at it.