“Instagram has evolved”: the process and craft behind Instagram’s first major refresh in over ten years

When Instagram first launched, its brand had to do a lot of explaining. “When you’re a new brand, you have to over-communicate,” says Christy Silva, Instagram’s creative director of brand design and creative marketing. “You’re constantly selling the utility, explaining the features, and trying to show everything at once.” Over time, that responsibility fell to just two visual elements: Instagram’s camera glyph and sunset gradient. Today, Instagram is familiar to billions of people. Instead of explaining what Instagram is, the identity can now focus on expressing who Instagram has become.

Director of brand design Cynthia Pratomo describes the redesign as Instagram “growing up”. That doesn’t mean becoming more serious. It just means recognising that Instagram no longer always speaks with a singular, unified voice. Scroll through the app and you’ll see carefully art-directed campaigns sitting beside blurry concert photos, vacation photo dumps and memes. The tone is “sometimes serious, sometimes encouraging, sometimes edgy,” as Cynthia puts it. The refreshed identity shifts away from one specific mood to a world where all expressions are welcome; the platform has to accommodate an enormous range of people, emotions, and cultural moments.

Instagram exists to showcase the work of its community, not the other way around. “We don’t like to talk about ourselves much,” says Cynthia. “Our storytelling focuses on the creators and content we’re celebrating.” This point of view was crystallised in the new identity. In this same spirit of realness, the refreshed identity consistently celebrates the act of making, not polished outcomes or perfect moments. In other words, it values the act of making, not only the act of posting. Christy describes this model as “a really well-designed sketchbook”. Something just structured enough to hold together while still remaining flexible enough to encourage weirdness and unexpected experimentation.

At a moment when many brands are looking to all things analogue as shorthand for humanity (not AI), Instagram’s team was all too aware of avoiding trend-chasing. But, they felt they had an authentic claim to much of the tactile visual language that’s percolating in the design world at the moment. In lieu of referencing creativity as an abstract concept, the new identity is rooted in the actual tools and rituals of photographic image-making – like contact sheets, registration marks and annotations. “That’s not a borrowed aesthetic,” Cynthia says. “That’s literally what happens on our platform every day.” Christy describes Instagram as, at its core, “the modern photo album”. In her mind, the redesign then is less a response to a trend than a return to something Instagram has always believed: that the platform exists to give anyone the tools to make an image and share it with the world. The tactile cues woven throughout the identity simply point back to the long-standing history of the camera and the darkroom, or even the family gathering around a slide projector to look at vacation snaps.

One of the most distinctive additions to the identity that speaks to this photographic history is the new viewfinder device. The form, derived from the camera glyph, frames imagery throughout the system and subtly “breaks the fourth wall” by drawing attention back to the act of taking the picture and, as Cynthia explains, “hopefully indicating the maker behind it”. The viewfinder is meant to remind the casual scroller that all the images they are seeing actually began in a real place: someone framing a shot, making a decision and choosing to share it with the world (and in a way, them specifically.)The team hopes the viewfinder framing in the design system can help make the act of taking a picture and putting it into the world feel “more accessible, more fun, and something we all can imagine ourselves doing”.

Not all the typographic changes Instagram is unveiling are quite so obvious. As part of the new changes, the team has also refined its existing typeface, Instagram Sans, as well as introduced a whole new face, Instagram Sans Mono. The changes to Instagram Sans are, admittedly, pretty subtle. But, “good typography is often felt, not noticed”, Christy says. The updated fonts have proportions that are wider, with smoothed out curves and flatter terminals to boot. This makes the typeface feel more stable and grounded while preserving the personality that made it distinctive (which originated with forms that match the camera “squircle”).

Instagram’s newfound focus on a kind of expressive restraint can be seen in its changing approach to colour. Though it was previously the most dominant brand motif, the sunset gradient now appears much more selectively. Like the annotations and contact sheets, the gradient now speaks to photographic past by showing up as a light leak instead of just a digital gradient. The team has also introduced an inverted gradient, green and blue on black for deeper feature layers. This new gradient allows the brand colour to be more variable and adaptable in more spaces as well.

The next time you open Instagram, you might find yourself scrolling before you even notice what exactly has changed. That just means the rebrand is doing its job. Rather than asking to be noticed, the refreshed look of Instagram is designed to be a background actor, or maybe a wingman; something that creates more space for the people making, sharing, and documenting their lives on the platform. It’s a surprisingly restrained approach for one of the world’s most recognisable brands. Maybe that’s what confidence can look like after ten years: being secure enough to celebrate the creativity of its community rather than compete with it. The brand doesn’t want to be the main character. It wants you to be.