The New Facebook Wordmark, a Backstory

2
Jul
2015

The New Facebook Wordmark, a Backstory

New Facebook Logo

In the spring of 2013, after I finished a custom typeface for Facebook, designer Scott Boms asked if I’d be interested in reworking the company wordmark. At the time they were rethinking a number of brand elements and including the wordmark seemed logical. The original was a lightly modified version of my typeface Klavika, released in 2004, so it seemed like a reasonable starting point for the next phase.

The Facebook design team forwarded a wordmark reworked in-house to give me an idea of where they were headed (fig.1). But, they mentioned it felt weighed down by the baggage of the old one. They liked the softer feel of their new version but were unsure how to continue its evolution.

The internal redesign by the Facebook design team – hover over it to compare with original. This was meant to soften the hardest geometric features of the original and introduce a more forgiving structure.

At this point though, our relationship was casual and we were brainstorming. There was no actual assignment. It didn’t matter though; I couldn’t get the workmark out of my head and I started to think of it as a personal challenge. I mostly tackled it away from the computer. I’m a fearless designer in the shower or on my daily bike rides — I can do anything! — but back in the studio, reality rudely kicks in.

The most refined of my early reworkings of the word mark – hover over it to compare with original. It maintains an open ‘a’, ‘c’, and ‘e’ but keeps the flat terminations of the original. My primary reason for investigating this direction was to determine if reducing the width of the open characters would allow for a proper lock up.

One of the biggest problems was the ‘ace’ of ‘facebook’. To make it powerful, those characters need to lock up. My best attempt (fig.2) was okay, but in the end, it looked like nothing more than a tuned up version of the original. So, feeling I’d taken it as far as I could, I archived the files and decided not to show anything to Facebook.

And then we all got really busy with other stuff and the project faded away.

Surprise: a formal proposal from Facebook.

Nearly a year later, in the fall of 2014, the wordmark project resurfaced. This time it was a formal competition that included proposals from other type designers. The brief was simple: evolve and modernize the wordmark to reflect the company’s growth and future momentum. After talking with the Facebook designers it was clear the new workmark should be approachable and friendly but maintain some feel of the original. It was time to start digging through my old files.

The competition progressed through a number of rounds, where each type designer submitted new or revised wordmarks based on feedback. After three rounds, I was awarded the project.

In collaboration with the Facebook design team, I continued to refine and work through various iterations of the wordmark. The design team provided creative direction and sought feedback from Facebook’s leadership.

Compiled below are my primary versions for the project, ordered from oldest to newest, and the eventual wordmark.

Round one. This version is the first and only of my proposals to ‘round the corner’ for the ‘a’, ‘c’ and ‘e’ terminations. Doing this creates a nearly-instant cohesion of letterforms but it degrades easily over colored backgrounds and at small sizes on screen.

Round one, an alternate version. I was pushing hard for this one. It locks up nicely as a wordmark and looks good over photos and color. In the end, though, it just didn’t have that ‘thing’. I couldn’t find a way to make the reduced, minimal shapes memorable enough without resorting to gratuitous nips/tucks/clips, etc.

Round two and three. At this point, I’d made a number of versions. This particular version was an attempt to condense the letters and incorporate clipped terminations in the ‘c’ and ‘e’ for more personality.

Round four and five. The forms in this version are pulled back, strokes are starting to get lighter, and the angled ascender terminations of the original wordmark make a return.

A version submitted the day before the final was due. I felt like I was defending the single story ‘a’ to the point where I no longer believed in it myself, so I reintroduced the double-story ‘a’. Doing so meant keeping clipped ascender terminations but reducing the overall width and removing round joins to stems for the ‘a’ and ‘b’.

The final version. A combination of several elements developed during the design process and built to honor the original ‘f’ more than previous versions. I drew nine variations of this weight — four heavier and four lighter than this weight — to determine that this instance was the best fit for screen and print.