back to article Unicorn adopts rainbow as logo

Instagram's changed its logo. And given us a spectacular example of the astounding language Silicon Valley manges to emit when talking about itself. “The Instagram community has evolved over the past five years from a place to share filtered photos to so much more,” says Instagram's post explaining its new icon. That missive …

  1. Hans 1
    Happy

    Damn, somebody unlocked the marketing team's office door @instagram ... Don't do that or weird things happen.

    Who cares about the logo anyway, seriously ?

    PS: It looks like more research went into these than HP Enterprise's.

  2. Christian Berger

    Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

    So a colour gradient kinda makes sense. After all many companies have either colour gradients or rainbows in their logos. Just think about Apple which is a rainbow. (I believe it was in a circle, but I haven't seen it for years)

    If anything it's more of a testament of lazyness among designers in that area.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

      Must logos avoid colour gradients because they're a bastard to reproduce consistently across different media (particularly screen and print) and at a wide range of sizes.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

        Yes, but considering they will be bought by some other company... or simply go bust, it's not really worth printing letterheads.

        The bigger problem is that there is no text, so you cannot easily search for those logos.

        1. Broooooose

          Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

          Instagram aren't going anywhere mate, they are already owned by Facebook, who paid a whopping $1B for it in 2012. They have 400 Million active members, 4x more than LinkedIn and are bigger than Twitter. And I guess printing letter heads isn't the biggest issue for an digital company in 2016 either.

          1. Cuddles

            Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

            "I guess printing letter heads isn't the biggest issue for an digital company in 2016 either."

            Just because your product is digital doesn't mean you don't still have a ton of paperwork going on behind the scenes, especially considering that most "paperless" offices end up using significant more paper than they did before.

    2. Mage Silver badge

      Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

      "Just think about Apple which is a rainbow. (I believe it was in a circle, but I haven't seen it for years)"

      The original was an apple with a bite out of it with six color stripes, no gradient. Inspired by Beatles "Apple Corp". They got sued several times by Beatles.

      Original Apple Logo

      Curiously the order is Green, Amber-Yellow, Orange, Red, Violet, Cyan!

      A rainbow would be Red, Orange, Amber-Yellow, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Violet (with no steps, pure graduation of millions of hues in reality). There is no magenta in a rainbow, as those "colours" are mixes of red and blue parts of spectrum with no green part of spectrum. Because we have three overlapping sensors peaking in Red, Green and Blue, the "magenta" is a sort of optical illusion. With a prism it gives light at both ends of spectrum and gap in the middle.

      [Apple also pinched iPhone name from Cisco and iPad name from Fujitsu and their clock's appearance from Swiss Railways. Ives minimalistic white styling is "homage" to the designs Dieter Rams did for Braun, nothing original]

      1. Adrian Jones

        Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

        And don't forget that Apple also pinched their GUI from Xerox.

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Well to be honest, it was dealing with photographs

        Hate to be a pendent (or maybe I don't), but the original Apple logo was inspired by Newton before the second Apple logo came along.

        Link and scroll down a bit.

  3. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Being a well-known brand - and that includes people being able to identify your logo at a glance - is usually listed unter 'intangible assets' and can be worth quite a lot. So maybe not a good idea to change it.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      I always thought that the Instagram logo was pretty good: an iconic retro camera with a flash. I haven't seen it very often but have no trouble remembering it.

      The new ones look far too generic.

  4. Doctor_Wibble
    Trollface

    Help, I'm confused

    How do these apps work with duckfaces, cleavages, or backsides, or is someone going to try doing that stupid 'other things do get posted on instagram' thing again?

  5. Chika
    Trollface

    Hangonamo... Rainbow is a pegasus, not a unicorn!

    1. Cirdan
      Happy

      Bro...

      ny!

      Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie forever!!!

      ...Cirdan...

    2. Michael Habel

      So which Unicorn had decided to take Rainbow Crash as its ward then?.... Rarity, Lyra, or Flim (and, or) Flam? I smell a new fanfic here

      1. Chika
        Trollface

        Heh... the Great and Powerful Trixie! Who else?

  6. jake Silver badge

    Who gives a rat's ass?

    The corporate logo is just marketing, to attract TheGreatUnwashed. It has absolutely zero to do with the actual product being sold.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Who gives a rat's ass?

      While I agree... and have an upvote, it really f*ckall to do with product anymore and is purely for marketing. If one reads the puff BS about what the logo means then one generally has too much time on their hands.

  7. Simon Harris

    Adopting Rainbow.

    They need to rename their apps Bungle, Zippy and George.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Adopt, Adapt, Improve

      No, these should be new applications:

      Bungle: automatically converts your decent pictures to introduce blurring, camera tilt and to move the subject out of the frame so that they match the rest of them

      Zippy: Adds additional image compression (or alternately, a help facility with a friendly icon... Oh, no. That was Clippy...)

      George: Government-sponsored app that prevents you from taking pictures of things you shouldn't. ("...don't do that...")

      1. Mark 85

        Re: Adopt, Adapt, Improve

        Add "Clapper" for "all your pictures belong to us and may be used as evidence against you."

  8. Peter Simpson 1
    Holmes

    I submit

    “reflects how vibrant and diverse your storytelling has become.”

    That my storytelling and that of my mates is no more or less vibrant or diverse than in previous years, but that Instagram has only just noticed the vibrancy and diversity, due to the fact that the sample size they see has grown.

  9. Ivor
    Headmaster

    Pedant

    "fount of design wisdom" or "font of design wisdom"? hmm.

    1. Frumious Bandersnatch

      Re: Pedant

      http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fount

      http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/08/poll-results/

      I prefer font, but I don't think fount is wrong

      1. Frumious Bandersnatch

        Re: Pedant

        I missed my 10min edit window ...

        Thinking about it a bit more, I think "fount" is more like a "wellspring", while "font" is more like a "repository". I think of wisdom as something more gained and accrued* than being a natural upwelling so a "font of wisdom" sounds more natural to me.

        * “Good judgment [wisdom] comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

  10. teknopaul

    rainbows

    Proof, if anyone needed it, that it is impossible to make an icon look too garish or out of place on an iPhone.

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