The designers at Instagram have slapped a “Mindless Rage” filter onto the people of the internet today, changing their old “hey, look, a vintage camera” app icon to one that looks like a tie-dyed piece of hard candy sitting in your iPhone’s apps folder. Nestled there, it waits, like a digital fishing lure, to trick you into thinking it’s one of a billion other brightly colored camera icons and disrupt your carefully calibrated, Instagram-based life. But the denizens of social media—never quick to adopt a change that doesn’t involve replacing their smartphones—have fired back, denouncing this disruption to their daily lives. Criticisms of the new design range from the inventive:
To the memetic:
To the refreshingly simple:
For its own part, Instagram says the change was long overdue, with head of design Ian Spalter laying out the reasons for the alterations on a blog post over on Medium. Spalter says the new design was built around creating an integrated brand identity for the Facebook-owned company’s other apps, Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse. (Even though most of us are too busy hanging out on Instagram, watching dogs get blow-dried to pop songs, to use or care about those other apps.) Spalter also discussed the updates to the app itself—removing colors and some of the visual clutter in its user interface—which have been greeted with a far less vitriolic response.
Still, not everybody hates the new app icon. Case in point, Buzzfeed’s Katherine Miller, who described the perfect, magical scenario that comes to mind every time she pushes the icon:
If only, Instagram. If only.