Opinion BY Armin

Hand Beats Filter in New Instagram Wordmark

Established in 2010 and hundreds of millions of photographs ago, Instagram is a “fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures”. Obviously, that’s an understatement. For its 100 million users, Instagram is as much part of life as texting and e-mailing and Facebook (who we all know paid a cool billion dollars to acquire Instagram in April of 2012 — who’s laughing now?) and its filters have established a new lingua franca for documenting food, clouds, and POV of places you are not in. Point being: Instagram is big. And important. Small changes are big changes. And its latest update, version 3.5, brought along with it a redesigned wordmark crafted by Denver, CO-based Mackey Saturday.

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A B-Side BY Armin

Shazam

About: (Est. 2002) “Shazam is a commercial mobile phone based music identification service, with its headquarters in London, England. […] Shazam uses a mobile phone’s built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user. Relevant links to services such as iTunes, YouTube, Spotify or Zune are incorporated into some implementations of Shazam.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Design by: The Brand Union.

Ed.’s Notes: Although I always hate the combination of upper and lowercase letters this ends up being a decent wordmark and the icon is much improved. A few more images of the icon and its construction below (or after the jump).

Relevant links: Press Release.

Provided quote: “We were thrilled to help Shazam transition from an app used to tag songs to a broader platform of discovery for TV, music, movies, live events and more. The new brand draws from the iconic loading disc that pops up when the app is listening. All of the new elements were derived from that expression, which we’ve enriched and made more responsive.”

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A B-Side BY Armin

Pocket

Launched in 2007 as Read it Later, the newly named Pocket allows users (over 4.5 million of them) to save articles, videos or web pages to the app that can be viewed later on any device (phone, tablet or computer). Introduction to the new name and features here.

Thanks to Yotam Hadar for the tip.