The new Instagram Sans font is inspired by the app's logo evolution
Plus: How the news media visualized the Uvalde, Texas school shooting
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
How the news media visualized the Uvalde, Texas school shooting
The new Instagram Sans font is inspired by the app’s logo evolution
Virgil Abloh’s new posthumous Louis Vuitton collection is here
How the news media visualized the Uvalde, Texas school shooting
We now know an 18-year-old gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, unobstructed on Tuesday and killed 19 kids and two teachers using an AR-15 as students called 911 for help and officers waited outside for about 40 minutes. It’s the third deadliest campus shooting in recent U.S. history.
Uvalde’s semi-weekly Leader-News went all black on its front page with just “May 24, 2022” for their Thursday issue.
TIME’s new cover, by John Mavroudis, is a hand-drew list of every U.S. city that’s had a mass shooting this year, with Uvalde and Buffalo, N.Y., at the bottom near the coverline “Enough: When are we going to do something?” There have been 213 mass shootings in the U.S. this year so far.
Mavroudis did a similar cover in Aug. 2019, writing the names of the 253 cities that had a shooting that year so far. He told TIME there were “so many familiar places to draw again. Chicago. Baltimore. Las Vegas. Louisville. Houston. Jacksonville. Stockton. And so many new places.”
Illustrator Brian Stauffer did the art for a Philadelphia Inquirer opinion piece on getting mad as hell about gun violence. On Instagram, Stauffer wrote, “DON’T LOOK AWAY. Stay angry. Act.”
The satire site Onion regularly publishes articles headlined “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” after mass shootings. On Wednesday, they repromoted all 21 versions of the article on their front page.
The new Instagram Sans font is inspired by the app’s logo evolution
It’s not just you, the Instagram app icon really is brighter.
Instagram rolled out a visual rebrand this week that includes a brighter gradient, new layouts, and Instagram Sans, a custom typeface with details inspired by its logo history.
Meta described Instagram Sans as a contemporary remix of grotesque and geometric styles. It comes in regular, bold, light, medium, condensed, and condensed bold, but its personality is most visible in script and script bold.
In the letterform for the Instagram Sans script fonts, you can see the inspiration from Instagram’s logos, with a playful sans serif that looks like it was hammered out of the script Instagram logotype.
The titles, punctuation marks, and rounded parts of the letterform are based on Instagram’s rounded square glyph logo. Meta calls the in-between moment where circle meets square a “squircle,” and it appears throughout the fonts, as does a teardrop motif, like in the interior of the lowercase “a.”
Instagram Sans is available in languages including Korean and Arabic, and a team of 40 typographers and language experts audited the fonts to make sure they worked in different alphabets, according to It’s Nice That. Meta said the typeface was designed with accessibility and global scripts at its core “to express a range of styles in any language.”
The rebrand comes at a crucial moment for Instagram and parent company Meta. Its stock fell a record 26% in a single day in February, which it attributed to slow revenue growth forecasts and Apple privacy changes. Young people would rather be on TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube, recent surveys from Piper Sandler and Pew have shown, and Facebook had the second-lowest favorable rating among 12 major consumer tech and social media companies in last year’s Verge Tech Survey. This company is in dire need of a facelift.
In other Meta news, the company plans to offer new data about how political ads are targeted in its public ad library this year ahead of the midterms.
“Instead of analyzing how an ad was delivered by Facebook, it's really going and looking at an advertiser strategy for what they were trying to do,” Meta vice president of business integrity Jeff King told Reuters.
Virgil Abloh’s new posthumous Louis Vuitton collection is here
Louis Vuitton rolled out two posthumous projects from their late men’s artistic director Virgil Abloh this week.
Louis Vuitton’s pre-spring 2023 menswear collection was “conceived” by Abloh, the fashion house said, and carried out by longtime collaborators and creative team. The collection includes 43 looks inspired by music students and concert goers.
Louis Vuitton also put out 47 Nike Air Force One editions designed by Abloh as part of an exhibition for their collaboration with the sportswear brand. Made with the Louis Vuitton insignia on materials like leather, crocodile, and faux fur, the shoes are now on display at an exhibition at the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse in Brooklyn through Tuesday.
Earlier this year, 200 pairs of the shoe — officially called the Louis Vuitton and Nike "Air Force 1" by Virgil Abloh — were auctioned at Sotheby’s. They brought in $25 million, and proceeds went to the Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund for fashion industry students of African and African American descent.
A limited number of nine of the designs will go on sale beginning in June starting at $2,750.