Instagram changed its logo this week. Not the app icon, the camera square on your home screen is staying put. What changed is the wordmark, the “Instagram” lettering that sits across the top of the app, and it’s the first time it’s been touched in 10 years.
The reaction was instant and pretty brutal. Within hours people had decided the new ‘r’ reads like a ‘z’, and the internet settled on ‘Instagzam’ as the official nickname. Comment sections filled up with variations on the theme. Designers queued up to explain what was wrong with the letterforms. It appears to have bombed.
However this was always going to happen, and it tells you almost nothing about whether the logo is actually any good.
Every rebrand gets roasted on day one
Gap changed its logo in 2010. The backlash was so fierce the company reversed the decision inside a week and went back to the blue box.
Tropicana redesigned its packaging in 2009 for something cleaner and more modern. Sales fell off a cliff. They were back to the old packaging within two months.
Airbnb launched the Bélo in 2014 and spent a fortnight being mocked relentlessly for what people insisted it looked like. Nobody thinks about that now. It’s just the Airbnb logo.
Instagram itself went through exactly this in 2016, when it swapped the retro camera icon for the pink-orange gradient. People hated it. There were even petitions. That icon is now so completely normal that most people can’t remember what it was like before.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule. The day-one reaction to a rebrand measures change, not quality. People aren’t evaluating the design. They’re reacting to something they’ve looked at thousands of times suddenly looking different, and the brain reads it as ‘wrong’. Give it six months and the noise will disappear.
Instagram can afford the bad reactions. You probably can’t.
This is where it gets relevant if you’re running a small business rather than a social network.
Instagram has around three billion users who will open the app every single day regardless of how they feel about the letter ‘r’. Not many people will delete the app over a wordmark. Instagram can absorb a fortnight of ridicule and come out the other side with everyone used to the new look.
A joiner in Worcester with two hundred regular customers is in a completely different position. If those customers stop recognising the van, that could mean lost work. The recognition you’ve built over eight years of turning up, doing good jobs and being seen around the same few towns is a genuine business asset, and it lives in your logo whether you like the logo or not.
Big brands rebrand from a position of overwhelming familiarity. Small businesses rebrand from a position of just about being familiar. The risk profile isn’t remotely the same, which is why “but bro, Instagram did it” is not a reason to do it yourself.
The question nobody asks first
Here’s what usually happens when a business owner tells us they want a new logo.
We ask why. And the honest answer, once you get past the first couple of reasons, is almost always some version of: I’m bored of it.
Which is completely understandable. You’ve seen that logo every day for six years. It’s on your invoices, your emails, your signage, your workwear. Of course you’re sick of it. But your customers haven’t seen it every day. They’ve seen it occasionally, and each time they’ve recognised it instantly and thought ‘oh, them, they did my kitchen.’ That recognition may have taken years to build.
There are however perfectly good reasons to rebrand. The business has changed what it actually does. You’ve outgrown a name that pinned you to one town or one service. The logo was designed in Word by someone’s nephew in 2011 and genuinely doesn’t work at small sizes or in a single colour. You’re merging, or splitting, or moving seriously upmarket. A new website produces an improved set of branding assets. These are all great reasons to redo a logo.
Most of the time when someone says their brand feels tired, the thing that’s actually tired is the website. The logo is usually fine, or at most needs a tweak. It’s the ten-year-old site it’s sitting on top of, with the stock photography and the layout that falls apart on a phone that makes the whole business look dated. Replacing the logo doesn’t fix that. It just means you’ve spent money changing the one thing your customers were using to find you, while the actual problem sits there untouched.
It’s interesting to see what Instagram didn’t do. They changed one element and kept the icon exactly as it was. Everyone still knows it’s Instagram. The restraint is a valuable lesson here..
If your brand feels tired, start by working out which part of it is actually doing the damage. It’s not always the logo. For an honest review of your branding and overall web presence, drop us a line.
FAQ
Most small businesses never need to. A logo should change when the business changes — new services, a new name, a move upmarket — not on a schedule. If nothing about the business has changed, the logo probably doesn’t need to either.
Rarely on its own. Customers find you through search, referrals and reputation, then judge you on your website. If the goal is more enquiries, a website that loads fast and works properly on a phone will do far more than new lettering.
A rebrand changes your identity — name, logo, colours, tone. A website redesign changes how that identity is presented and how well the site converts. Most businesses that think they need the first actually need the second.