Yes, it’s shocking but true, Facebook is doing away with its trademark thumb’s up like button. Don’t fret though, “likes” aren’t going away, they’re just getting a new re-design.
It may seem like a small thing to change, but considering that the little blue button gets viewed and clicked over 22 billion times a day, any change with those numbers is big. The buttons plastered across nearly every website (just like this one) will soon be altered to have a more bold blue color and a trade-off from the thumb’s up to just the Facebook logo. The whole redesign was actually six months in the making, kinda hard to believe something that small and simple actually went through six months of changes!
Facebook’s branding manager said that it was time for a change. “The Like button was this light blueish thing that usually fell away,” Hugo van Heuven told Co.Design. “We thought we could make it more prominent, look a little bit better, and be more consistent.”
There will also be a new size standard of 20×48 pixels that web developers will use. Van Heuven hopes this will help Facebook look a little cleaner, with the old buttons ranging from 18 to 22 pixels tall, too often developers would clip them and it just looked less clean.
Probably one of the less noticeable but certainly more important changes was the choice in bold blue color. The team tried grey, black and various shades of blue and found that the new blue color resulted in more clicks and shares than other choices. The only problem is that it didn’t quite mesh well with the Facebook thumb. “Because the thumb has a light and dark element, it’s a really hard icon to use in a situation like this,” said van Heuven.
Hence, adios thumb, hello Facebook logo. The new like logo is consistent with the top of Facebook’s page and va Heuven hopes will bring even more brand consistency.
Just like almost every other change that Facebook makes, you can probably bet on people whining and fussing about it for a few days before they completely accept it and forget it was ever any different. Remember when Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg’s face in their logo? Nobody’s missing that are they, well, except for maybe Mark Zuckerberg.