Facebook (2023)Copied

By 2023 Facebook was one product among many under Meta, and its own brand had become inconsistent across app, marketing and wordmark. Facebook's design team, working with an outside studio from September 2022, set out not to transform the identity but to move it forward: unify how the brand appears across product and marketing, widen the colour system and use a single typeface everywhere.

The changes are deliberately small. The f symbol is slightly redrawn and set in a deeper, more saturated blue. The wordmark is redrawn using the company's custom Facebook Sans so it sits in the same family as the product typography, which Meta said improved legibility and consistency. The palette expands, mostly in blues, and Reactions get more dimension and emotion through the wider colour range. The studio says hundreds of concepts were designed and tested to get there.

Credits here go to Meta's in-house Facebook design team, which led the work with an outside partner. It arrived in September 2023, with the darker blue explained in terms of contrast, legibility and accessibility.

Meta's own design blog set out the reasoning. With two billion people using Facebook every day, the team named three drivers: elevate the brand's most iconic elements, unify how Facebook appears from product to marketing, and build an expansive, more accessible colour range anchored in the core blue. The logo was meant to feel bolder, electric and everlasting, with refinements that its director of design said achieved optical balance with a sense of forward movement. Meta described this as the first phase of the refresh: the iconography system was rebuilt so Reactions scale across the app, and the new Reactions were still in testing, due to roll out in the following months. Designboom noted the contrast with X, which had just swapped blue for black.

The Verge's reaction summed it up: basically the same as before, except the blue is darker. That is an accurate description and not a criticism. For a mark seen by billions daily, an invisible upgrade is the responsible choice, and tightening the relationship between logo and UI type is the sort of improvement that only shows up as fewer inconsistencies. It is just not much of a story.