This is Facebook’s new logo

Yesterday product designer Christophe Tauziet quietly unveiled a brand new logo design for Facebook.

So far feedback on the new logo from Facebook’s 1.44 billion or so users is sparse, and that’s for a few good reasons. Most importantly, the design doesn’t appear to have even rolled out yet — a visit to Facebook.com (logged out) reveals the original logo we’ve known and tolerated for about ten years.

But even if you stumbled upon the new logo — designed in collaboration with Eric Olson — yesterday or today, you probably didn’t immediately notice the change. The new look, while wildly different under a microscope, was intentionally designed to adopt every shred of Facebook’s existing brand awareness — and that’s what makes the redesign a bit, well, unnecessary.

A direct comparison of the new logo versus the old clears up what’s changed. Here’s Facebook’s somewhat friendlier, less robotic logo, via The Next Web and the design sleuths at Brand New.

Above: Graphic via Brand New

Later, Facebook sent us a comment on the new design from Josh Higgins, the company’s creative director:

Today, we updated our corporate logo with a new look. When Facebook’s logo was first created in 2005, the company was just getting started and we wanted the logo to feel grown up and to be taken seriously. Now that we are established, we set out to modernize the logo to make it feel more friendly and approachable. While we explored many directions, ultimately we decided that we only needed an update, and not a full redesign. We worked with Eric Olson — whose typeface Klavika was used in the original logo — and developed a custom typeface to reflect where we are now and where we are headed.