Is Instagram aspiring to be VSCO?
By Paul Syng
At first glance, my knee-jerk reaction is Instagram’s new look appears to mimic VSCO (commonly labelled anti-Instagram or the artistic and curated version of Instagram). Let’s not pass on the judgemental baton, yet. The ensuing argument, a hypothesis born from a misguided understanding of the equation, would prove unfair.
“What I’ve learned since is that design is the art of solving specific rather than abstract problems. If the problem is not clear or well-understood, you cannot begin to evaluate how effective the solutions are.”
“When we pass judgment on a design, we are usually inferring the problem we think it is trying to solve.”
— Julie Zhuo, Product Design, Facebook
Having said that, if this were a conversation about design and prettiness, the new look isn’t bad. It’s ok. I wouldn’t go parade negative about the pixels and rainbow spectrum. And I like using Instagram. But the point I wish to drive home, with this blog, is that I think Instagram lost an opportunity to create meaningful impact and reinforce their brand promise.
People’s feelings matter. They fucking do. The stakeholders, the team, the users and so on. There are cosmic forces at play here. More on that in a minute (at the risk of sounding condescending). But first, to form an opinion, let’s switch into research and discovery mode, leave all our assumptions at the door, and try level from an informed place.
Ready? Let’s begin with Instagram by pulling together a swatch from across the web.
“Systrom had developed a few concepts in his spare time, but in late 2009, he concentrated his attention on one: An iPhone app that would combine elements of Foursquare with elements of Mafia Wars, a popular game developed by Zynga.
“I figured I could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends,” Systrom wrote on Quora. “Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all.”
Systrom called his idea Burbn, and the app’s primary functions were to let users check-in to locations, make future plans with acquaintances, earn points for hanging out with friends, and post pictures.”
“We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing.”
“It was “cluttered” and “overrun with features,” Systrom noted on Quora, adding that the photo feature was by far the most popular. So in August, the founders made an incredibly risky, but perhaps prophetic, decision: They’d scrap Burbn almost entirely in order to build an entirely new app from the ground up.”
— Inc
“Indeed, when you have a consumer-facing app that is going to be advertising dependent, scale matters most. If you don’t have the eyeballs, you don’t get the advertising dollars.”
“When Instagram took funding from Benchmark Capital, their new board member Matt Cohler, who came from Facebook, encouraged them to focus on growth first and worry about the revenue model later.”
“Instagram was going to be worth whatever Mark Zuckerberg felt like paying for it.”
— TechCrunch
“When Instagram was founded, it was a place to easily edit and share photos. Five years later, things have evolved. Instagram is now a diverse community of interests where people are sharing more photos and videos than ever before; using new tools like Boomerang and Layout, and connecting in new ways through Explore.”
“Brands, logos and products develop deep connections and associations with people, so you don’t just want to change them for the sake of novelty. But the Instagram icon and design was beginning to feel, well… not reflective of the community, and we thought we could make it better.”
“While the icon is a colorful doorway into the Instagram app, once inside the app, we believe the color should come directly from the community’s photos and videos. We stripped the color and noise from surfaces where people’s content should take center stage, and boosted color on other surfaces like sign up flows and home screens.”
— Ian, Head of Design at Instagram
And here’s what users have to say about Instagram
Instagram seems like a “measure twice, cut once” sort of company. Deliberative, almost to a fault. Even if you disagree with the direction in which they’ve taken their brand today, do not think for a second that they did this on a whim. They stuck with the old skeuomorphic camera icon for years after everyone else went flat. Now they’ve gone with something very different, and very abstract. I like the idea, but I’m not sure I care for the rainbow gradient they arrived at. The combination of a white device against a colorful gradient background reminds me quite a bit of some iPod ads from a decade ago. The colors they chose don’t look connected to the colors of the old icon’s rainbow. In short, it looks and feels like an altogether new brand for Instagram, not an update or refresh of their old brand — and I’m not convinced that was the right move. Even something as simple as keeping the “leather” on the top half of the camera, as proposed here by Ian Storm Taylor, would have preserved more of the original brand.
Here’s an OCD critique by Bryan Mamaril.
The last reaction being the funniest thing I saw on the internet that day.
And now a swatch of VSCO from across the web.
“Named by Apple, “Best App of 2013” with over a million downloads its first week of being live.”
“We run an old school rather than [new technology] startup,” explains Lutze, “We make products and sell products. The creative integrity of the brand is more important.”
—FastCompany
“We noticed that it wasn’t that people wanted more content in the world,” Flory said. “There’s an overconsumption, if you will — people are looking for a curated voice.”
—BloomberTech
“The fact that we have humans curating as opposed to an algorithm, that’s something that defines us,”
—Ny Times
VSCO co-founder Joel Flory told Fast Company that “We like to see VSCO Grid as a museum, where you’ll only share your best… We’re not really concerned about the numbers. A user might post 100 images to Instagram, but we want them to post their five best photos to VSCO Grid.”
(Evolution of vision)
“We’re not interested in creating another social network,” says VSCO co-founder Joel Flory. “We’re interested in redefining what it means to create, to discover content, and to connect. We want to give people the ability to connect and to interact. That’s part of being human. But we want to do it in a different way than others currently are.”
One of the most interesting things about the redesign was the decision to create a new visual communication system, which functions kind of like a primitive language. Through nine weeks of intensive research, the company focused on creating “a system that would allow us to visually communicate,” they wrote.
After being inspired by patterns in nature, VSCO’s design team landed on a series of symbols based on “mapping simple geometric shapes to the artificial and natural systems that are manifest in our everyday life.” It’s not clear exactly how the grammar of the communication the system will function, but the designers want it to “mimic the tension between the ‘messiness’ of nature and precision of mathematics,” they wrote. To clarify, this isn’t for use in the app — this was made for external messaging and branding, the company said.
—Motherboard
And here’s what users have to say about VSCO.
“They’re trying to be too trendy with their minimal design approach and actually making the app a little harder to use than it should be. The icons in same places have no relation to what they do, and with no written labels its a little trial and error until you manage to do what you want”
“I can definitely agree here. I’m a regular user of VSCO, the results of the app are really good. But the icons in the app don’t really relate, so it’s just trial and error that gets you there. But after some time you do know your way around and it becomes pretty natural.”
I ••• like it. The story is maybe a bit t•• in depth, but they created a coherent visual language which give them the freedom to play. No standard logo, no text labels in their app. It fits their audience. ( + ) It has a high Friday Like standard; no generic stuff, no conventions, try to make something different, maybe mostly because it can/may be different.
I know I’m being a bit cynical here, but I feel like almost every successful startup goes through this at some point.
1) Create the product.
2) Make product useful, achieve some success.
3) Get some serious funding to back the product and expand the design team.
4) Realize the product doesn’t really need that much updating, so you need to find something to keep the design team busy and on retainer and not go to some other Bay Area startup.
5) Panic at competitors catching up, and feel some crazy desire to philosophically justify your “brand” using bits, atoms, cells, dildos, etc.
No one knows how to say their name. Their app is a UX nightmare. So their new identity is actually on brand–convoluted.
I love that those posting criticism in the form of ‘this is hipster rubbish’ ad infinitum are probably designers and yet demonstrate a hilarious lack of self-awareness: this industry we work in is built on this sort of hokum; we rationalise lines and shapes on a daily basis. Really, VSCO should be applauded for their balls, vision and their theoretical coherency (sort of).
And given their target market — well-educated, yuppyish arts and humanities grads — isn’t this identity bang on? If we’re to use the term ‘hipster’ — which is essentially a byword for “I know fuck all about the visual significance or historical antecedents of this identity, so I’m going to rubbish it” — then isn’t it a great success? Hipsterdom is a mainstream market niche now. Hipsters are abundant. Hipsters love shit like this. Hipsters love VSCO. VSCO wins.
Too complicated, even the UX/UI app. But I’m a fan of the filters and the curated collections of movies. In this universe there is no kittens and adverts. Long live VSCO.
I think we are in a slightly better position to take this debate head on by observing the different signals these companies are making.
Alright. What are the key takeaways? Let’s line them up.
Instagram founders built for scale, no business model, algorithms and funding. Being led by product and what their users wanted- building prototypes, learning from their mistakes and stumbling upon the popularity of in app photo feature. An instant hit at the app store quickly becoming a mass market product equipped for a spectrum of age-groups, mindsets, class, culture, race and so on.
At no stage Instagram got up and announced their vision or why they exist as a brand. It’s easy to answer what they do and how they do it but the why lacks clarity. And with that comes disconnect in a visual exercise which touches the hearts of millions.
So when the head of design at Instagram goes on to say “the Instagram icon and design was beginning to feel, well… not reflective of the community, and we thought we could make it better.” most of us have no idea what is this community he’s referring to… Who are these people anyways? And why does Instagram want them in the first place? Are they numbers for advertisers to get excited about?
And, from becoming a meaningful milestone in Instagram’s product journey the visual work quickly comes across as lipstick on a gorilla. Hence, the lash back. Users forgotten, left behind or not a part of the aforementioned community? And users don’t like it.
On the contrary
VSCO founders built, meticulously well thought-out, curated experience around their product and content- not algorithms or scale but for people and the community. Despite the naysayers, they’ve maintained their brand integrity and stood ground constantly voicing their reason for existence. A cash-positive business right out of the gate and sticking to their guns no matter what. A loyal community ensues. They’ve constantly reminded the world of who they are as a brand, not product.
Another way to look at it, is the Windows vs Apple example. Both are successful companies. Where definition of success for one being scale and asking what the user wants, and the other being brand and showing what the user needs.
Coming back to Instagram. They wanted to scale, sell and be used by millions. We can hand it to them for a job well done. So where does that leave the new design?
The spectrum plus black and white adapted for UI championing the content appears to be inspired from VSCO’s Design journal page. But I’m sure there’s more algorithms at play and it’s not all black and white (no pun intended).
The lack of brand driver/positioning results in the absence of a design driver which feeds into the design department, informing their process. Even though this approach stems from branding it holds relevance in the digital space. With Instagram’s new design lacking brand authenticity it becomes evident their objective was executing visual design.
This, the lack of brand strategy in product strategy, is an industry wide phenomenon with blind faith in certain methodologies which I intend to discuss at length in a future blog.
Borderline, sweeping generalisation?
Lastly, by observing the different brand signals and school of thoughts adopted by each company, with an “outside-in” approach, I can only say so much. Hopefully, by the end of this rant, I can trigger a meaningful dialogue and constructive debate.
I will leave you with some interesting quotes. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
With all the advances we’ve seen in the last 20 years, what makes for great experiences — for great design — hasn’t changed at all. It still boils down to solving real problems, for real people, in a snapshot of time.
— Geoff Teehan
and
To be involved in strategy is to be involved in the why — the identification of real problems, the prioritization of which of those problems are most pressing to solve right now.
— Julie Zhuo, Product Design, Facebook.
and
“Brand is the idea that you stand for, made real by what you do.”
— Wally Olins
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