Reimagining one of the world's most recognizable brand assets. Much of my practice explores the relationship between colour, light, and perception. This project became an opportunity to apply that research to one of the world's most recognisable visual identities; treating the gradient not as a graphic element, but as a phenomenon of light.

For Instagram's 2022 brand refresh, I developed a new approach to its iconic gradient by constructing it entirely from light.

The gradient is one of Instagram’s most recognizable brand elements. For this refresh, the aim was to evolve it into something more vivid, dimensional, and alive, without losing the warmth and familiarity people instantly associate with the brand.

In the early concept stage, I kept returning to the same question: How do you evolve something so iconic without losing its identity?

My first instinct was to work within the existing visual language of the gradient. I explored digitally painted blends, textured surfaces that caught light, warped forms, and a series of 2D experiments that introduced depth through light, shadow, and materiality.

The experiments were visually interesting, but they all shared the same problem: they added complexity without making the gradient feel more alive. I realised the solution wasn't to redesign the gradient itself, but to rethink how it was created.

That became the turning point in the project.

The brief described the gradient as needing to feel more dimensional and more illuminated. Rather than asking how I could paint a gradient that looked like light, I asked a different question:

What if the gradient was made from light?

That shift in thinking changed the direction of the project completely. Instead of treating colour as a flat graphic element, I built a three-dimensional lighting rig using multiple coloured light sources. As the lights projected, overlapped, and interacted across a surface, the colours blended naturally, while a shallow depth of field softened the transitions into smooth gradiated shifts. The result retained the simplicity of the original identity, but introduced a genuine sense of luminosity and depth.

It was this approach that received the green light. Beyond the final aesthetic, it also gave the team a flexible system that could be adjusted and art-directed while finding the harmony between the set of 5 colours.

When you're redesigning one of the world's most recognizable app icons, even the smallest change can generate hundreds of reactions online. 

Instagram's gradient is one of the platform's most recognizable assets. The challenge wasn't to redesign it, but to evolve it, making it feel brighter, more dimensional, and more immersive without losing the familiarity that millions of people instantly recognise.

The solution also needed to perform across every touchpoint: from the app icon and Story rings to motion, marketing, and brand communications. It had to be flexible enough to live everywhere while always feeling unmistakably Instagram.

When the refreshed identity launched, the gradient immediately became a talking point online. The reaction was a reminder of how emotionally attached people are to familiar brand assets, even subtle changes can spark strong opinions.

That sensitivity reinforced the central challenge of the project: evolve one of the world's most recognizable gradients without losing the qualities that made it feel unmistakably Instagram.

The breakthrough came from rethinking the medium rather than the image.
Instead of designing another 2D colour blend, I treated the gradient as a composition of light. Each colour became a physical light source, carefully positioned within a three-dimensional scene. By controlling their intensity, position, and interaction, the colours blended naturally through illumination rather than digital painting.

The result retained the simplicity of the original gradient while introducing a new sense of depth, atmosphere, and energy.

I developed a fully adjustable 3D lighting rig using Instagram's refreshed five-colour palette. The system allowed me to rapidly explore different lighting compositions while maintaining complete control over the character of the gradient.

Rather than manually painting transitions, I shaped the relationship between the lights themselves, refining where colours overlapped, intensified, and softened. A subtly reflective surface and shallow depth of field helped the colours merge into smooth, luminous transitions while preserving the feeling that the gradient was generated by light.

Because the gradient now existed as a lighting system rather than a painted image, it could be art-directed in real time. Changing a single light transformed the composition while preserving the integrity of the palette. 

The final gradient became part of Instagram's 2022 brand refresh, appearing across the app icon, Story rings, and wider brand communications.

More than a visual update, the project introduced a new way of thinking about one of Instagram's most iconic brand assets. By building the gradient from light instead of colour, it became a dynamic visual system, one that felt brighter, more immersive, and flexible enough to evolve across motion, digital experiences, and future applications.