Great job! Hats off to them, I was only half expecting a see a sentence like "This truly captures the 'essence of Facebook', which we'll refer to as 'Mark' throughout the remainder on this document"
Designing the Facebook Company Brand
91–100 of 238 posts
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's interesting to me is why anyone would bother with tweaks like that. They probably spend millions in design per year and have to keep their designers team working. At that scale nothing is left to chance, they A/B tested their logos for months &. If it makes them looks .1% better and improve signups by the same amount they're golden. > I only noticed those details when they were explicitly pointed out. And th…
> If it makes them looks .1% better and improve signups by the same amount they're golden I have trouble imagining that any sort of measurement tying signups to the logo would have a margin of error smaller than that. I assume this is just a made-up number to signify how much they care about slight changes, but I think the general point that they realistically would have trouble getting any amount of useful signal fr…
> I assume this is just a made-up number to signify how much they care about slight changes
Yes it is, I have no idea what they monitored but I'm sure they didn't chose randomly.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#93No doubt, this is truly great design work, kudos to that team!
However, I can't help but feel my massive distrust for the company overshadow this work, and give me a very un-easy feeling about the true intentions of this entire thing.
For me, the "transparency" I want to hear about does not come from a font, but from open sharing of advertising!
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The "A" and the "K" are fascinating. Almost imperceptibly bent...The "B" also has a belly. What's interesting to me is why anyone would bother with tweaks like that. The logo looks like a generic san-serif block letter logo, and I only noticed those details after they were explicitly pointed out. Even after looking at it several times, the bent lines register as defects to me rather than as an aesthetic design choi…
> What's interesting to me is why anyone would bother with tweaks like that. They probably spend millions in design per year and have to keep their designers team working. At that scale nothing is left to chance, they A/B tested their logos for months &. If it makes them looks .1% better and improve signups by the same amount they're golden. > I only noticed those details when they were explicitly pointed out. And th…
> they A/B tested their logos for months
I doubt it; I could instantly spot jagged edges of their design, it looks more like a rush job.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the government itching to break up tech companies? I feel like it's a bad idea for them to get involved at all.
Tech companies in particular have very concentrated employee bases - there is a lot of incentive to grandstand against them if your constituency doesn't get many benefits, especially if that constituency comes from places that don't have much in the way of technical literacy. Still, breaking up any company for being too successful is a great way to keep your economy from growing. I don't imagine sane politicians will…
Saying that the reason FB is being targeted for anti-trust is that they are simply too successful feels like a vast oversimplification of the situation.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#96I don't have anything insightful to add, but I dislike the wordmark aesthetically. The concept of empathy = dynamic style is interesting to me though.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech companies in particular have very concentrated employee bases - there is a lot of incentive to grandstand against them if your constituency doesn't get many benefits, especially if that constituency comes from places that don't have much in the way of technical literacy. Still, breaking up any company for being too successful is a great way to keep your economy from growing. I don't imagine sane politicians will…
Breaking up trusts definitely helped - its the concentration of wealth and non-existent trust enforcement why there's so much consolidation and market concentration in a handful of firms.
Breaking up Microsoft didn't necessarily help any competitors, but it definitely made their products worse. Breaking up Bell turned one giant monopoly (with a well funded research division that drove innovation) into a bunch of regional monopolies that didn't necessarily drive better consumer outcomes.
Trustbusting is a very blunt instrument and there's not much data that it actually drives the results it intends. It would be better to address the market conditions that drive the industry to a monopoly.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#98Would’ve been better, IMHO; to pull an Alphabet and rename the company. This reminds me a little of the ‘Apple TV’ vs. ‘Apple TV’ article running around recently. If Facebook wants to differentiate their company from their service, a rename makes sense and also wouldn’t hurt their reputation when they create new products.
Facebook should split their engineering services into its own layer, similar to AWS. They can then sell social media services to fb, ig, wa, and any competitor willing to pay. They could allow sites to white label the fb identity system, and offer their own isolated dir. They could sell anti-evil(spam/hacking)-as-a-service. They could sell localization. They could sell messaging infrastructure and image hosting.
This is a far cry from a rebranding. Restructuring into a parent/child company or redesigning a logo don't affect the day-to-day operations of Facebook employees. Shifting into a white label company does, and it's a huge risk for a company not built for it. Facebook is good at full-stack, and will take the approach that lets them work to that advantage.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#99Although a post about updated branding may seem benign, this is, I believe, a response to critics who believe the company should be broken up. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/opinion/facebook-antitrus... https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-explains-why-facebook-bro... https://www.cnet.com/news/can-facebook-be-broken-up-what-you... Facebook is hoping that by differentiating its company brand from its fl…
The thing is, the differentiation that they tried to establish with the new branding is itself confusing. Using the same word just with different capitalization to specify between the company and the app is not going to help in any significant way since the two different logos can only be expressed differently in certain contexts. Which makes you wonder just how intentional that detail is.
Re: Designing the Facebook Company Brand
#100This is probably a better link: https://facebook.design/companybrand
Ok, we've changed to that from https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/11/introducing-our-new-com... . Thanks!
Thanks for including the previous link in this comment, they're both good. Seeing it in the context of their apps is definitely interesting