The inside story behind Instagram's original app icon, which was designed in 45 minutes
Instagram shocked the world on Wednesday with a complete redesign of its app icon.
The change was surprising to many because Instagram's icon has stayed frozen in time for more than five years. While most app icons became sleek, modern versions of their former selves following the launch of the redesigned iOS 7, Instagram's icon remained unabashedly nostalgic - a throwback to the analog cameras of old.
Instagram's new design and icon took the app's team of designers nine months to complete, according to Fast Company. They drew out the original icon by memory to boil down its main attributes and tested hundreds of possible icon designs.
That's an impressive amount of effort for an icon redesign. What's even more impressive is that the original Instagram icon - one of the most famous app icons ever created - was designed by just one guy in 45 minutes.
The guy is Cole Rise, a professional photographer and designer. Rise told Tech Insider about how an unexpected phone call from Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom resulted in him quickly designing the icon for one of the most popular apps on earth.
In the fall of 2010, Rise got a phone call from Systrom. The two were friends at the time. The first version of Instagram had been available on the iPhone for two weeks, and Apple had decided to feature it on the home page of the App Store.
The only problem was the icon, which at the time looked like this:
The icon had been designed by Systrom, but it looked too similar to an existing camera from Polaroid. Systrom needed something that was unique. Rise was an early beta tester of Instagram, and Systrom came across an icon he had designed on Dribble that was based on an old Bell & Howell camera from the 1940s.
It looked like this:
Systrom liked it, and he asked Rise to modify the icon before sending the app's assets to Apple. The only catch was that Apple needed the assets in an hour or else Instagram wouldn't be featured, which was the main way apps could get exposure early on.
Rise went on to serve as a design consultant for Instagram and make several of the app's filters, including the appropriately named "Rise."
So what does Rise think of the new logo now?