FoursquareCopied

Foursquare launched in 2009 as the check-in app. By 2020 it was mainly a B2B location data business, its consumer side split into Swarm and City Guide, and it had bought Placed in 2019 and merged with Factual in 2020. Co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote of growing pains, and the company admitted to an identity crisis: a playful consumer brand selling enterprise software.

Los Angeles studio PlayLab began the work in 2018, but MediaPost reported internal disagreement put it on hold. Creative director David Godycki joined in late 2019 and picked it back up. PlayLab partner Archie Coates said Foursquare was no longer the app people knew; Godycki said the artefacts of its previous life had to be left behind, while keeping some trademark playfulness.

Out went the chunky type, the superhero F, the watermelon pink and the stickers. The new wordmark is set in Authentic Sans 90 in black and white, with an abbreviated FSQ mark. Sometype Mono, reminiscent of code, handles annotations. The accent is 'hyperlink blue', a tribute to digital wayfinding, plus an orange gradient for merchandise and business cards. New icons and data charts use line weight and negative space so the brand does not overpower data stories, and the positioning became Foursquare Everywhere, with 'Powered by FSQ' labels hinting at technology already inside other apps.

Design Week's commenters were unimpressed: 'BoreSquare', and postmodern brutalism claiming another victim.

Foursquare's own post was candid about the road there. It described colleagues coming and going and periods of fluctuating success, called itself the unapologetic leader in location technology, and pointed to Foursquare for Good, including making foot traffic data available to those helping contain the pandemic. It said answering the questions behind the rebrand, what to preserve and when to change, took months. A company admitting its growing pains in a launch post earns some credibility, and the new identity needed it to persuade anyone the check-in app was gone.

They were half right. For a data supplier the restraint makes sense, and hyperlink blue is a nice nod. But this is the 2020 tech-minimal template exactly, and FSQ, in the age of dropped vowels, is forgettable. It traded the most memorable thing Foursquare owned for credibility it could have earned with less.