Facebook alters its logo in “subtle, but significant” rebrand

Facebook has launched an in-house refresh of its visual identity. The Meta design team has been busy lately, creating the brand for Threads (as the product was being built) this July, and relaunching Instagram just last year. Accessibility is front of mind for the Facebook refresh. The social media platform also wants to elevate its core assets. As Facebook design director Dave Nguyen puts it, the goal of the work was to “expand upon our foundation”.

A lot of the work centres on colour. The refreshed logo – which many have already pointed out is a subtle alteration – features a “more confident” iteration of Facebook’s signature blue, a press release says. It’s a deeper hue which provides greater contrast against the ‘F’ to help with visual accessibility in the app. Dimensionality has also been knocked out of the symbol, to create a flattened mark, and the wordmark has been refined to improve its relationship with the custom typeface, Facebook Sans.

In the wider brand you’ll find an expanded colour palette, also optimised for accessibility. Blue is still the foundation, of course, but there are greater ranges in tones across secondary blues which offer the platform more options when moving from, say, marketing to speaking to its users in the app.

Reactions have received attention too – the like has always been an essential part of the Facebook DNA and the reactions bar is just as crucial to the user experience today. The icons have been designed to be more legible at smaller sizes and the expanded colour range means the reactions can express more “emotion”, according to Facebook.

“Redesigning the brand identity for an app used by billions of people worldwide is no small feat. Throughout this journey, there were moments of excitement, fear, laughter, frustration, joy and others throughout the development of this new identity,” says Dave Nguyen. “We wanted to ensure that the refreshed logo felt familiar, yet dynamic, polished and elegant in execution. These subtle, but significant changes allowed us to achieve optical balance with a sense of forward movement.” Facebook will roll out the changes gradually, with more updates to follow in the future.

Social media logos have received lots of attention this summer. In July, Elon Musk caused commotion online with the user-submitted logo that X (previously Twitter) adopted in an overnight rebrand.