Facebook is Facebook, but it is also a parent company that owns WhatsApp and Instagram. Despite the negative press over the past few years, Facebook wants to remind you that it owns those apps, which underpins the reason it has revealed a new parent company logo and branding.
The logo is a very 2019 plain uppercase typeface that (in the below GIF) transitions from blue (Facebook) to green (WhatsApp) to pink (Instagram) to show you just how much of your data one company owns.
It means this isn’t the new Facebook app or website branding but the logo you’ll see appear in various places in WhatsApp and Instagram like the login page, and in all future corporate communications from Facebook as a wider company.
In a blog post Facebook CMO Antonio Lucio said, “Facebook started as a single app. Now, 15 years later, we offer a suite of products that help people connect to their friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.
“Today, we’re updating our company branding to be clearer about the products that come from Facebook. We’re introducing a new company logo and further distinguishing the Facebook company from the Facebook app, which will keep its own branding.”
He goes on to say the rebrand is “designed for clarity” and is in uppercase to “create visual distinction between the company and app”, which makes sense to suits in a boardroom but might confuse a few normal people when they see it on their WhatsApp.
The blog also reminds us that Facebook additionally owns Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra.
All in all, it’s quite hypocritical of Facebook to be talking about transparency when it is refusing to ban political advertising on its platform after admitting its system can run ads with false claims in them.
The news here is that a company that makes millions of dollars wilfully spreading misinformation has a new logo – that does not make it a more transparent company.
Author: Henry Burrell, Phones Editor
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.