When brands release new icons and logos, previously loyal customers often groan with frustration.
This happened when Instagram changed its app icon at the start of May. The flatter, more abstract design was described by Adweek as possibly "one of the biggest design fails of the year."
But the industry trade title was wrong, according to new analysis from Dragonfly, a design-analysis app created by Black Swan and researchers from Queen Mary University of London.
The new logo is actually 10% more engaging to the human eye than its predecessor, according to the app.
Dragonfly uses a computational model to process the visual characteristics of what someone is looking at (orientation, contrast, texture, luminance) to assign a stimulus attention score to every pixel, demonstrating its attractiveness. The resulting graphics are heatmaps that display what grabs human attention in the first three seconds of interaction.
Business Insider asked Dragonfly to analyze the old and new logos of 10 major brands, giving each a saliency score out of 100. Below are the results:
Instagram's old logo has a mediocre saliency score of 58. Dragonfly suggested that it relied on "nostalgia" and that much of its saliency relied on the 'Insta" text, offset against the lighter background.
The new, controversial logo has a more impressive saliency score of 68. It is "more impactful," according to Dragonfly, with the "bright gradient of colors interrupted by the white outline of a camera," drawing eyes to the center of the image.
Google's old logo has a decent saliency score 67, which is unsurprising for such an iconic brand.
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