The Facebook Logo and the History Behind the Company

Our good old Facebook started off as a local website in a college student’s dormitory room. However, as of today, it is a globe straddling colossus with literally billions of active online users. It also has a significant influence on the global stage.

However, the history of Facebook is certainly a really interesting story. Let us take a closer look at its admittedly illustrious life story, while simultaneously looking at the platform’s famous and indeed iconic logo. We will also see how it has played a key role in making Facebook, the social media platform, the undisputed ruler of online social cyberspace.

Facebook: Its history and its origins

In 2003, a student in his sophomore year of college at Harvard University named Mark Zuckerberg came to his dorm. He quickly created an online social media platform known as Face Mash.” Here, Harvard students would be able to see two pictures of their fellow students juxtaposed to each other. They also got to vote which one was the most attractive of the two. Needless to say, the administration was not amused, and the website was quickly taken down as per varsity orders. As for Mark, he was lucky he was not permanently expelled from this institution. However, the seeds of the Facebook platform had now been planted.

A year later, an undaunted and unrepentant Mark decided to create his own version of an online directory of Harvard students. He called this as yet nascent directory “TheFacebook.”
Within a week of the launch of the site, he ran into controversy after he was accused by three fellow Harvard students of pretending that he was actually going to help them build a website called HarvardConnection.com.

However, according to them, he used all of their ideas to build his own competitor website. The trio of students than proceeded to contact Crimson – the local varsity newspaper. There was an investigation after that. However, “TheFacebook” became wildly popular on campus. As a matter of fact, within only the first month, almost half of all undergraduate students who were enrolled at Harvard university had their own separate accounts on the website.

At the initial level, the membership on “TheFacebook” platform had been strictly limited only to Harvard students. However, Zuckerberg soon decided to open his platform to students of Stanford, Yale, and even Columbia varsity. Shortly after that, the membership of this network based platform was subsequently opened up to include all of the ivy league schools around and eventually to the public at large.

Later in the same year, the Facebook platform was duly incorporated and a certain Sean Parker who was one of Mark’s informal advisors when he was in the process of actually building the website – was declared as the president of the company. Shortly after that, the platform dropped the “The” from its name. To make the transition successful, the company paid over $200,000 to buy the domain facebook.com.

Facebook remained a fully private company up till 2012. In that year, the company went on to hold its IPO or initial public offering. The company’s stock has been able to perform very well even as Facebook thrives and continues to increase its active user base and as it also increased its profits and revenues through advertising. As of now, the company continues to excel in the corporate sector due to its very high profitability ratios.

Now let us see the role, that Facebook’s hugely popular logo has played in making the company such a runaway success, and let us also study Facebook logo history, as well.

The Facebook logo today

Once it was clear that Facebook was going to become a global success, Mark Zuckerberg and president Sean Parker went on to hire Mike Buzzard of the Cuban Council to design an absolutely wonderful logo for the as yet nascent company.

The logo that Mike had designed is those far off days is to this day almost identical to the platform’s current logo. In fact, if you were to juxtapose Facebook’s original logo with Facebook’s new logo, you will quickly see that the company has decided to make very minor changes over the years.

Interestingly, the Facebook logo color scheme had been chosen because of a certain vision condition that Mark suffers from. It is called deuteranopia. This is a mild form of color blindness.

The person finds it difficult to distinguish between certain colors. But the one color that even a deuteranopia sufferer can easily see and distinguish is blue.

Unlike the evolution of Facebook features, the logo itself has differed little from its older iterations. In fact, so minor are the changes that to the average layman, it will be very difficult to even discern them, unless you are looking for them, that is.

This is because the Facebook platform has stuck by its usual simplicity as well as recognizability, at least as far as their logo is concerned. They have opted to keep it as stable as possible. Especially after vectoring in the many changes of the platform. In fact, the website as it was in 2005 (for instance) is now almost completely different from its origins. While the logo, as well as the central blue and white color scheme, have remained (more or less) the same, but the site itself has undergone a steady evolution regarding its myriad features.

Conclusion

In light of the above, we can safely conclude that the Facebook platform is highly popular for two reasons. The simplicity and recognizability of its logo and its ability to evolve with the times.