The Part They Won't Touch
Instagram just rebuilt its logo for the third time since 2010 — everywhere except the one part that started as someone else's camera.
In October 2010, Kevin Systrom drew Instagram's launch icon himself — a Polaroid OneStep SX-70, close enough to trace: same lens ring, same viewfinder window, same diagonal rainbow stripe. Two weeks later Apple wanted to feature the app on the App Store's home page, and before it would, its own lawyers flagged the icon as an obvious lift of Polaroid's actual trademarked design. Systrom had days to make it go away.
He brought in Cole Rise, a photographer who'd been beta-testing the app, and Rise built the replacement in under an hour — not a Polaroid this time, but a 1950s Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera, redrawn from scratch instead of traced, same beige-brown palette and rainbow flourish kept as a wink. That badge ran from 2011 to 2016 and is still what most people over 25 picture when someone says "old Instagram."
2016 flattened all of it into the gradient camera-glyph that's been sitting on every phone since — mocked hard at launch, absorbed just as hard within a year, and now recognized on sight by color and outline alone across roughly two billion home screens. It's the one piece of the identity Meta has never touched again. Building this year's refresh, the design team tried camera concepts a second time, along with all-caps treatments and literal handwriting, and set every one of them aside — the icon itself was never actually on the table.
What did change, announced August 13, 2026: the wordmark. "The wordmark at the top of the app hasn't changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh," Adam Mosseri said, unveiling a new typeface called Instagram Sans that drops the old fully-cursive script for a hybrid — script curls kept only on the s, r, and g. Within hours the internet had already renamed it "Instagzam."
So the part of the logo that started as somebody else's design, close enough to draw a legal letter, is the part Meta now treats as too valuable to risk. The part that's never been anything but the company spelling its own name is the part that keeps getting rebuilt, and keeps getting laughed at for it — per TechCrunch's coverage of the launch.
One more circle closes here: Cole Rise, the guy who redrew a camera in under an hour in 2011, is friends with one of the designers on this year's wordmark team, and has already said the new letterforms' "bones" are "beautiful" — that he thinks they'll "persist over time." Whether they do isn't really his call anymore, or Mosseri's either. It's whoever's still typing the word into a search bar in 2036.