Facebook (2015)Copied

Facebook's first wordmark arrived in 2005, set in Process Type Foundry's Klavika, and was meant to make a student network look grown up enough to be taken seriously. Ten years on, creative director Josh Higgins said the company was established and wanted the logo to feel more friendly and approachable. The team explored many directions and concluded that it needed an update, not a redesign. Wired reported that a new wordmark had been under consideration since 2013.

The change is small enough that Sky News asked whether anyone could spot it. The most visible move is the switch from a double-storey to a single-storey a, which Eric Olson, Klavika's designer, told Wired was the one thing he most wanted to carry into the new version. The letters are thinner, rounder and a touch shorter, with more white space, the contrast between thick and thin strokes is gone, and the b gained a more organic stem. The white f on blue square, by far the most visible piece of the brand, stayed exactly as it was.

The lettering was a collaboration between Facebook's in-house design team and Olson, who drew a custom typeface for it. It was revealed in a tweet with little fanfare and rolled out to the site, the apps and office signage.

Reaction split along predictable lines. The Verge called the new wordmark even more generic than the old one. Wired framed it as business, not design: Siegel+Gale's Howard Belk read it as a utility change for small backlit screens, while Base Design partner Min Lew said it gained in practicality what it lost in personality, and wondered whether every iconic brand needed to become friendlier. Creative Bloq found designers mostly positive.

Adweek's account underlined how small the change was and how long the old mark had lasted. Facebook had used essentially the same logo since 2005, its name in white Klavika on blue, and now switched to a custom typeface developed in-house with Eric Olson, the designer of Klavika. The company's creative director described the aim as modernising the logo to feel more friendly and approachable. A side-by-side overlay of old and new circulated on Twitter, the easiest way for most people to see that anything had changed at all.

It is a sensible piece of maintenance. Klavika's squared-off, pixel-era letters looked of their time, and the new forms read better on a phone. But it also strips out the one quirk the wordmark had, and it confirms that at Facebook the f, not the name, does the work.