Facebook's First Corporate Logo Is All About Differentiating the Company From the Platform

It's a new era at Facebook: On Nov. 4, the tech giant unveiled its first-ever corporate logo, a wordmark meant to represent the company as a whole, including all of its subsidiaries—among them Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus—as well as, of course, the social media platform. Facebook CMO Antonio Lucio said the idea of creating a unified corporate identity has been in the works since he started at the company, about a year and a half ago. Some of his earliest conversations with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were about "the need for the corporate entity, for Facebook the corporation, to have its own narrative, its own look and feel separate from the app." "The type of conversations that we need to have are topics of world relevance that transcend each and every one of the apps," Lucio said. "Topics like election interference, information privacy, data management, but also issues like the positive impact that social media has on the world as well as the vision that Mark and this company have for the internet with the convergence of people, technology and information." Facebook announced the news of its new corporate identity to employees in a post on its internal Newsroom page, but many in the company—as well as users—were consulted during the process of creating the new wordmark. Lucio described Facebook's marketing strategy as threefold: The first priority is to rebuild the corporation's reputation and public trust; the second, to "ensure that each and every one of our individual apps has the right voice with its right user base, with comprehensive experiences that people want;" and the third is for users to understand that "all these offerings brands are coming from the from the same place." Differentiating Facebook the company from the platform Perhaps one of the biggest drivers in molding what the wordmark would look like is the desire to differentiate the overall Facebook company from the social media platform. Now a multibillion-dollar corporation with plenty of other properties under its umbrella—besides the aforementioned, there's also the smart display device Portal, the Libra cryptocurrency and Workplace, its office collaboration tool—Facebook wanted to be able to have a separate identity that spoke solely to Facebook as a corporate entity. "Our hope is that we will help people to develop a relationship with the Facebook company overall," said Luke Woods, vice president of product design at Facebook and one of the designers behind the new visual identity. "We can help to provide people with clarity as they're using various products, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, that these are all part of a larger Facebook company." While this new wordmark is meant to differentiate Facebook the company from Facebook the app, it's also meant to help people develop a connection with Facebook the company, rather than simply its standalone products—and to realize that all those products are in fact owned by Facebook. It's a mindset that makes sense for a business that's taken quite a beating in the public eye in recent years, thanks to numerous scandals, primarily centering around data privacy. Using it across Facebook's products, said Lucio, is an effort to create greater transparency for the average user of Facebook's services, who might not realize that, say, Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook, the way legislators, Facebook's clients, journalists and others would. "The only group that has been a bit left out of this conversation was our people, our users," he said. "Given the need for more transparency, the need for more authenticity, it was the right time to actually bring them into the fold as well." Creating a unified wordmark The new wordmark is sleek and simple, putting "Facebook" in all capitals in a custom sans serif typeface. Every element of that typeface was designed to distinguish it from the iconic Facebook wordmark that is known around the world. The new wordmark uses capital letters, while the Facebook app wordmark is lowercase. The new wordmark has rounded corners, while the app's has sharper edges. The new wordmark has letters with a good deal of space between them, while the letters in the app's wordmark are close together. [kickout id="2"] Taking on a chameleon-like quality, the wordmark's color changes depending on which setting it's seen in. At the bottom of the Instagram login page, it's colored in the familiar yellow-purple-pink ombre that is Instagram's signature aesthetic. On Facebook.com, it comes in the familiar blue. On its own, it's a neutral shade of gray. "We saw an opportunity for the Facebook company mark to take on the color of each of these product brands that people are familiar with," Woods explained. "Rather than take a typical brand approach where we're going to introduce this color, we're taking this more novel approach of color adoption that just becomes more interesting from a corporate identity and visual design perspective. "As well, it's quite aligned with our core objectives, which is to create clarity and closer connection between our consumer product brands and our company identity." [kickout id="1"] Lucio said the decision not to have an official color for the wordmark stems from a desire to create something that would easily work in a variety of settings, no matter what app or product it was appearing in or on. "We wanted to make sure that the design reflected that this was a corporation that is composed of a family of apps, products and services [but] would exist on its own, and at the same time that it would have the flexibility to support each and every one of the brands that we support." Facebook design director Zach Stubenvoll believes versatility was top of mind while creating the custom typeface, which was made with a type foundry. "If you think about the technologies and the story of this company, we're showing up in product, we're showing up in environments, we're showing up in marketing, and really building a [wordmark] that could perform in all those environments was very important in terms of the engineering of the typeface itself," he said. The introduction of this wordmark was a natural step for Facebook considering its current place in the ecosystem as a leading corporation with a number of brands under its purview, Lucio said. He pointed to companies like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola, both of which also have a corporate name and logo, as well as individual names and logos, as a precedent-setting move. It's also similar to how Google introduced its parent company Alphabet in 2015, creating "a clear distinction between all of Google's projects." The new wordmark is also a tool to build for the future, said Lucio. "The architecture that we are creating for the corporation and its relationship with each one of the individual apps and services is something that, hopefully, we will be able to evolve over the next 5, 10, 20 years," he said. "So that at the end of the day, when I'm not even around, the Facebook brand, the Instagram brand, Messenger, Whatsapp, Oculus, Portal are vibrant brands all under the beautiful umbrella of the Facebook company."

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