Facebook unveils new logo in stunning change for fans of the letter A

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox

Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

A year on from Google's radical one pixel movement of its second letter 'g', Facebook made a similarly subtle and fastidious change to its logo this week, altering the kerning of its letters and switching out the 'a' for a new one.

Facebook's in-house design team collaborated with Eric Olson of Process Type Foundry to create a "more friendly and approachable" design which features a single-story instead of double-story 'a' (because the old one was really threatening, let's be honest).

If the change isn't immediately obvious or particularly striking to you, it's probably because we rarely see the full word 'Facebook' these days.

In the smartphone and tablet age the social network is nearly always marked with its simplistic 'f', which is the only letter that remains unchanged in the new logo.

Here's what Facebook had to see about the reason behind the edit (via Brand New):

When Facebook’s logo was first created in 2005, the company was just getting started and we wanted the logo to feel grown up and to be taken seriously. Now that we are established, we set out to modernize the logo to make it feel more friendly and approachable. While we explored many directions, ultimately we decided that we only needed an update, and not a full redesign. We worked with Eric Olsen — whose typeface Klavika was used in the original logo — and developed a custom typeface to reflect where we are now and where we are headed.