Instagram rolled out “brand update” today, which is mostly a fancy term for updating some marketing materials and making big, handcrafted statements about logos. There are a lot of them here too. (May I interest you in a long digression on luminous gradients?) But there’s also a much bigger change: Instagram has created its own font called Instagram Sans, which it plans to use more widely in the future both in marketing and in the app itself.
The company said Instagram Sans is inspired by the Instagram logo, and “reflects the look of the avatar and our commitment to simplicity and craftsmanship.” (Like I said, the wavy hand.) It’s largely inspired by a mixture of squares and circles, or as Instagram lovingly calls them, squirrels. And as Instagram has always tried, it’s a pixel-perfect blend of handcrafted with some details, like the not-so-straight stop below the “t”, that make it look more human. In some places, you can watch the evolution of the cursive Instagram logo that has been in use for years.
Most Instagram Sans fonts are fairly simple sans serif fonts, which makes sense for a brand with a global and diverse user group. Instagram said it has worked with linguists to ensure the fonts work in as many languages as possible, including script languages like Thai and Japanese. In some fonts, only a small bump in the tail of the capital letter “Q” indicates that it is an unusual font. But there’s also the Instagram Sans Script, which adds sweeping brush strokes to just about every letter, sometimes for cool effect (the capital letter “W” looks like a super hip yoga studio logo) and sometimes for results. Too weird (“lowercase” doesn’t even look like a letter “r”).
However, what Instagram’s most ridiculous fonts offer is a more distinct identity. One of the places the company hopes users will try on Instagram Sans is Stories and Reels, where captions written in Sans Script will not look like a ripped TikTok video. When vertical video becomes the norm, a certain similarity pervades the social landscape, and while the unnecessarily undulating “x” doesn’t change everything, it is.
However, the real question is how users will feel about the new look. Meta knows better than anyone how resistant users are to change; Remember all the “10,000 against the new Facebook!” groups? Maybe that’s why Instagram started small rather than completely revamping everything about the app from day one. But don’t be surprised if you see squirrels starting to appear in more places before you know them.
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