The Old Instagram Logo That You've Never Seen

When you think of Instagram, the company's sleek brown-and-tan icon probably comes instantly to mind.

You know, this one:

What you might not know, however, is that Instagram's icon used to look drastically different. Here it is:

Instagram CEO and co-founder, Kevin Systrom, designed the original retro-looking icon as a rendering of an actual camera. Why the dramatic switch? Systrom posted on Quora that the company eventually canned the old icon because it had "nothing to do with Instagram."

Here's Systrom's full response:

I designed the original one - and honestly it came down to branding. I'm very excited about our 2.0 icon and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The initial icon was a rendering of an actual camera that had nothing to do with Instagram. At that point, you have to realize, we had 80 users and I really just liked the idea of having a retro camera stand for Instagram.

It became really clear very quickly that we needed our own brand, and as part of that we enlisted help from one of our users Cole Rise - who after many iterations has created a really gorgeous icon that we all identify with as Instagram today.