Facebook AI Branding

With the mission of bringing the world closer together by advancing AI, the AI organization at Facebook is an open-source research organization that needed its own brand identity to help communicate its scope and distinguish its work from the Facebook Co. brand.

More than just supporting the Facebook family of apps, Facebook AI develops technology that connects, protects, and empowers people. For the Facebook AI rebrand, we investigated what the organization stood for and how best to build a brand that would speak to their audience and communicate their values.

Role Creative Direction and team development as Communications Design Manager at Facebook AI
With Facebook Creative X, Character and Hello Monday

Brand Positioning

AI is a totally new frontier for humans, new science, new innovations, new possibilities, and new fears. The real pathfinding depends on leveraging human ingenuity. The collaboration and generosity between people are what make AI matter – the people behind it and the people for whom it's made.

Facebook is all about human connection, and Facebook AI attracts those who celebrate the people side of science – to advance this new field through science and engineering; to better serve human beings, not to replace them; to protect human life, not endanger it. Reinventing responsible software engineering in the age of machine learning, Facebook AI embodies open, collaborative, and at-scale AI/ML research excellence. The existing brand expression, however, did not reflect this.

It was focusing on the wrong half of what makes innovation possible. People are the ones putting in the work and thinking carefully, using their creativity to create and discover something good, sharing breakthroughs with peers to propel new ways of thinking, solving practical problems for everyday folks, and tackling big, complicated challenges for humanity at large.

To get to the root of this, our process started by honing in on the audience, interviewing stakeholders, surveying the team, and analyzing the competitve space. We landed on some core tenants of our brand positioning as outlined below. Combined with our research, we worked to align with the new Facebook Co. brand that launched in 2019.

The Design System

As a group that contributes the all of the FB apps, we sit under the overarching brand for Facebook. Building equity in the Facebook Co. brand, we use the Facebook logo lockup. As we do much more than just this, we also appended the new logo with "AI" to distinguish our organization and its work.

We wanted the bright vibrancy and the variety of the research to come through, so we chose a diverse color palette with a focus on a family of purples. Purple is a color of the future; it's gender neutral and is associated with creativity, wizards, and is distinctive in our competitive set and from the facebook app.

We were inspired by the work itself, the variety and the impact of the AI visualizations, tools and formulas that came from computer vision, machine learning, and so much more. Fostering transparency, we used these visualizations from the AI papers that the organization publishes. We used organic holding shapes to contain and abstract them.

The Website

Why is Facebook working on AI? We wanted the answer to this question to be clear to users upon arriving at the site. We placed the focus on our mission first, with the intent to demonstrate clearly and transparently how we are committed to being open with our research and our work. We dig right in to featuring some key new research in a simple carousel at the top of the homepage. These light visual animations allow users to dig deeper and learn more. We used the organic shapes, almost windows into Facebook AI, that feature a slight life-like movement to bely the intelligence of the AI in our work.

We added new photography to showcase our team members, allow candidates to picture themselves working here, and add a human, collaborative element to the site amongst all the research. We included a news carousel to surface latest news, events, awards, and our frequent blog updates. We incorporated research textures to highlight notable papers and blog content. We kept the system's grid lines lightly in the background as a nod to transparency and "showing our work." We built these into reusable components across pages for consistency and developer flexibility.

Photography

The Website

Global Event

The Website

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