The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Meta has given Threads a standalone identity as a statement of independence. Launched in 2023 as a companion to Instagram, Threads is Meta’s text-based platform for public conversation, which has grown to more than 500 million monthly active users. Its launch identity leaned on that lineage, borrowing so heavily from Instagram Sans that it struggled to stand apart from its parent. “It read as inherited rather than distinct, and it felt static,” Head of Design Chris Clare tells us. “We wanted to leave that behind entirely.”

To make that break, Meta turned to Studio NARI, the London-based creative studio, briefing it to create a wordmark and glyph that could stand on their own while staying native to the Meta family. The resulting identity NARI created gives Threads a distinct posture, built to match how public conversation moves.

Leaning on Instagram made sense at the start. “It was the on-ramp,” Clare explains, lending Threads instant credibility and making the connection clear from day one. As the platform matured and built communities of its own, though, “the visual connection started working against us,” he notes: people were not always distinguishing Threads from Instagram content, and the brand was not doing enough to communicate what Threads is for. The refresh became a move of clarity, meant to make Threads instantly recognisable wherever it appears. Those communities gave the timing its urgency, with strong traction in sport, music and culture – K-pop membership alone had more than tripled – where fans react in real time and the biggest cultural moments are driving the platform’s growth.

The rest of Meta’s portfolio is “deliberately understated,” in Clare’s words, a set of “containers.” Threads is not one of them. “Threads is a behaviour: real-time public conversation,” he tells us, and the brand had to move with that energy rather than sit quietly beside it. That reasoning steered the work away from the neutral, geometric wordmarks big social platforms tend to go for and towards something with its own momentum, with the team settling on italic. It leans forward “and matches the energy of people showing up, sharing their take and keeping the conversation going.”

The wordmark is built on a construction principle Studio NARI calls the Trending Chisel, drawn from the chisel-tip marker and the behaviour of highlighting what matters now. Directional cuts and controlled contrast give the letters their sense of immediacy and movement, building that quality into their structure from the start. The letterforms were “drawn from the Highlighter,” Clare details, and “the angles, the chisel cuts, the forward lean all reference that mark directly.”

Once the Trending Chisel became the governing principle, the letterform calls followed on from it. Studio NARI placed its cuts where the eye already expects movement, at the transitions between stems and curves, and held back everywhere else. “Just as important was knowing where not to intervene,” Design Lead Lauren Davidson explains, since holding back makes the moments of contrast count for more. The ‘t,’ ‘h,’ ‘r’ and ‘a’ did the most work in breaking from Instagram Sans – their angled joins and terminals setting a more editorial rhythm across the word – while swapping the double-storey ‘a’ for a single-storey form gave the wordmark a more distinctive silhouette. The forward lean does the same job as the cuts, hinting at motion before anything actually moves. Davidson wanted that motion “to feel inherent to the drawing rather than only applied through animation,” so that on screen the letters look as if they are being cut or highlighted in real time. The hardest part, she adds, was “knowing when to stop,” since every cut adds personality but too many “become decorative and start competing with the content they’re meant to support.”

“The wordmark itself is completely bespoke,” Davidson tells us. It’s both clear and functional in the product, expressive and directional in campaigns and live moments. NARI drew it as the foundation of a broader custom typographic language for the brand to build on. The glyph applies the same chisel construction in compressed form. Rather than reinventing the existing Threads symbol, NARI evolved it, preserving its recognisability and equity. It is “drawn in one continuous line, no breaks, no separate strokes,” Clare notes. “A single path.” The shape mirrors how conversation on Threads flows continuously, and it holds up cleanly at the size of an app icon.

“The mark actually leaked before launch, and first reactions were mixed,” Clare tells us – taken out of context and with no explanation, the reaction was tough. Once Meta launched it properly and explained the thinking, the conversation shifted, and people engaged with the craft, debated the decisions and shared their own takes, with the full brand system and custom typeface still to come. “That arc felt very Threads to me,” he reflects.