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Taking to his official Instagram account, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced a new change coming to the platform. For the first time in ten years, Instagram has officially changed its wordmark. The Instagram new wordmark is the text you find at the page header on the Instagram app. Previously, this wordmark used a sort of cursive text font often associated with the “Billabong” style, though Instagram has not officially named the original typeface.

Now, the social media giant has shaken things up regarding this wordmark and has introduced a new version in a hybrid print-and-script style built from a new typeface family called Instagram Sans (alongside companion styles Instagram Pen and Instagram Mono). While the wordmark is new, it borrows some design elements from the previous wordmark.

Instagram New Wordmark: Instagram Played It Safe With the Change to Its Wordmark

Change isn’t something that fans and users of Instagram services take lightly. Over the years, various brands have moved to redesign their logo and faced intense backlash from users of their products or services.

An example of a brand that attempted a change to its logo in recent years, and it hurt its reputation, is the car brand Jaguar. Since the change to its logo in November 2024, Jaguar has yet to fully recover from the backlash it got as a brand.

A logo is an identifying mark for brands, and changes to it might make said brand unidentifiable to its user base. Instagram understands this and didn’t play around with its actual app icon with this recent redesign.

The Instagram app icon (the colorful gradient camera) remains unchanged; however, the wordmark is what is being changed. Regardless of this, Instagram still played it safe and carried over some design elements from the previous wordmark to the new iteration.

With the old wordmark, all letters in the word ‘Instagram’ have a connecting cursive flow, except the letter “I.” The new logo retains the cursive flow between the letters “n and s,” as well as “r and g,” as well as the curve on the tail of the letter “g.”

This registers some sort of resemblance in the minds of users associating this new wordmark with the previous wordmark. By doing this, Instagram saved itself from some backlash, or did it?

Is It Instagram or “Instagzam”?

Taking to his Instagram page, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said the new wordmark is “cleaner and more modern” than the previous wordmark, adding that it carries “references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.”Users in the comments were divided, with some praising the change and others asking why the letter “r” looked like a letter “z.”

He also took the change announcement to his official Threads account, and users started calling the app “Instagzam” (along with other nicknames such as “Instagwam” and “Instaguam”). So despite playing it safe with the design change to its wordmark, Instagram still wasn’t able to escape the backlash, but it kept it under control.

What to Expect Next From Instagram

The Instagram app icon was updated in 2016 from the brown camera icon to what it is today. Over the years, updates to the Instagram app have built around this icon and the color gradient it introduced.

Today, most people associate Instagram with the blue, purple, pink, red, orange, and yellow color gradient. This color gradient is baked into the Instagram app, with various actions taken within the app giving feedback based on these colors, though Instagram has said the gradient will now be used more sparingly in its branding going forward.

A change to the nature of this logo’s layout might impact the Instagram brand identity and trigger an uproar among fans using the platform. So, effecting a design change that’ll affect the Instagram app icon might not be in the playbook for the social media giant anytime soon, especially as the new wordmark itself is still rolling out gradually across the app, website, and official materials through the rest of 2026.