Facebook Rebrand: Can Capital Letters Save a Toxic Brand?

Amid antitrust investigations, Capitol Hill hearings, and a normally bad track record, the business revealed on Monday it is reinventing itself with a rebrand. In the coming weeks, a new multicolored, all-caps logo design will certainly begin showing up across its solutions. Instagram and also Whatsapp, owned by the business, will happily inform individuals that they are services "from FACEBOOK".

Facebook Rebrand

Facebook is the social network you dislike; FACEBOOK is the firm you didn't recognize you enjoyed.

But why FACEBOOK? The upper-case logo proves the company's worthiness. It's designed with "clearness and also visibility" in mind, a blogpost explains, with "harmonized uppercase". All checks out: after all, what is FACEBOOK otherwise an area of visibility as well as consistency?

And that's not all. FACEBOOK utilizes "vibrant" shades, with the logo design "tackling the shade of its environment". The firm calls this "an empathetic shade scheme", that makes sense. Blue is simply mean, yet brilliant environment-friendly understands me. On top of that, "the refined softening of corners and diagonals includes a feeling of optimism". Who could consider the brand-new FACEBOOK as well as not feel renewed hope surging via their veins?

The rebrand has actually prompted basic eye-rolling-- the AV Club's Allison Shoemaker mentions that even peppering the logo design with unicorns would certainly not save the business's picture. But that will not quit marketing teams from trying.

Simply last month, Yahoo went the contrary instructions, selecting a lowercase yahoo! in an initiative, as Chaim Gartenberg noted at the Edge, to remind individuals of its existence. Provided the need for interest, you would certainly think believe the company may have stuck to the capital letters. But it did, according to make notes, go with the font style Centra No 2 Extrabold-- which, naturally, screams "I'm relevant!"
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One more fallen internet titan, AOL, did the exact same a years previously. It moved to Aol., with the period, most likely to recommend that its life-span was coming to a close. This came at a time when, with the economic situation in the storage tank, the support in the New York Times was that "vibrant, block capital letters are out", in favor of a softer, friendlier lower-case strategy. Probably it signifies a strong economy, after that, that FACEBOOK has actually activated caps lock.

On the other hand, unlike media firms such as VICE as well as POLITICO, FACEBOOK does not seem using all caps in its copy-- just in pictures. This is good news for duplicate editors that would prefer not to assist business rebrand. It's especially great news for the Guardian's copy workdesk, which puts a costs on lowercase-- unlike FACEBOOK, we're not yelling at you.

Still, you might question whether pasting the brand-new logo on other solutions is a wise relocation: why tarnish Instagram as well as Whatsapp with a bigger logo design of the bad realm? (The services had already been rebranded with a lower-case recommendation of their moms and dad business.) Will not it backfire to advise people that their trusty, end-to-end- encrypted WhatsApp comes down from the business that brought us the Cambridge Analytica rumor? Won't Instagram's hipness be damaged by a pointer that its manager is King Zuck, Lord of the Nerds?

To FACEBOOK's credit, it's not fleeing its reputation-- though it did consider a name adjustment. "We intend to step up and take care of what we have to deal [with]," Facebook's chief advertising and marketing police officer, Antonio Lucio, informed Bloomberg. It seems the firm reasoned that its association with WhatsApp as well as Instagram would do even more to assist FACEBOOK than to damage the applications themselves.

Simply put, the firm is distancing itself from the despised solution it actually created by propping itself up on the cherished socials media it acquired. So when international powers disrupt the 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg can inform Congress: certain, Facebook has its troubles. But FACEBOOK is doing just great.