New Logo of facebook

The original logo was designed in 2005 by Joe Kral and Cuban Council using Process Type Foundry’s Klavika as a starting point. The wordmark has become quite iconic, perhaps not to the degree of a Coca-Cola but its tight letterspacing, hard corners, and very subtle variations in thicks and thins, have made it instantly recognizable. This is an even more amazing feat given that the wordmark rarely appears on the site. Yet we all know it. Which is what makes this change so difficult to process.

There are multiple changes that, although perhaps considered subtle by the Facebook team, heavily affect the appearance of the new wordmark. The double-story “a” has been changed to a single-story. The “o”s and “e” are rounder, and the “b” has a more traditional stem. In essence, this is a perfectly acceptable wordmark, a kind of twenty-first-century Franklin Gothic for the millennial generation. It has a great rhythm, it’s perfectly crafted — although the left part of the “e” seems a tad heavy — and it’s very nicely kerned. The problem is that, for lack of a better thought, it does not compute. It’s as if I told you that the following word is colored green. Red, green, wha?… that’s the feeling I get when I see this new wordmark. I know it says “Facebook” but it’s not Facebook.

This is by no means the fault of the execution of the new wordmark but the fact that it’s a visually significant change that tries to keep the same silhouette (and more metaphorically, the aura) of the original but has replaced all the elements with something else. If this had been the original wordmark, then that’s that. It would be Facebook’s logo and we would associate the pronounced connection between the stem and bowl of the “a” and “b” as the distinguishing elements. Right now, we all have to disassociate the last ten years — ten years that have been all about the astronomical surge of the organization — of what we picture when we think of Facebook. And that’s pretty damn hard.