The new Instagram logo is the perfect embodiment of AI

What happened

Today, Instagram unveiled a refresh of its wordmark, accompanied by the usual bland corporate platitudes these kinds of announcements are always packaged with. ” Sure, Adam. Simplicity and craft are definitely what everyone thinks of when Instagram comes to mind.

’ But mostly the whole “I am a robot, and I don’t know what an ‘r’ looks like” action. As a functional piece of text, I don’t think the new wordmark does a great job. It has legibility and identity problems. But as a symbol of our new AI slop era? It might actually be unintentional genius.

Why it matters

I might be more inclined to think ruthless algorithmic capture, relentless influencer hype cycles, and don’t forget mining every last gram of your personal data to be packaged and repackaged and sold. Still, it’s been 10 years since the wordmark was updated, and in the current fruit fly life cycle of frenzied tech rebirths, that’s almost staid.

I mean, it literally looks like the almost-but-not-quite-real words that generative AI often outputs in images—the weird cutoff letters and spacing that come out of the noise. The ‘s’ is supposed to be a callback to the old logo’s cursive, but it feels like the random number generator grabbed a different typeface.

What to watch

This kind of housekeeping for a brand isn’t something I would normally remark on. But I had two thoughts when I looked at the new text. ” I don’t mean I think the design team at Instagram used AI to make the logo. I doubt it, honestly; this is something machines are still terrible at.