Why is the Snapchat logo a ghost?

Of all the social networks that we use on a daily basis, it is probably the one that has the least popularity, as well as active users, but thanks to it we have some extraordinarily innovative and fun content that its competition has not had the slightest problem copying. This is the case of those stories that have become so famous in recent years and that are practically present, in one way or another, on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.

From one ghost to another

Why is the Snapchat logo a ghost

You may think that what kind of video is the one that we have left you right here above, but it is a curiosity that we can find on the official channel of the social network on YouTube, published four years after the premiere of Snapchat and that shows us its creator narrating the virtues that we are going to find in the official application of the service. His name is Evan Spiegel, he is still the CEO of the company and he has a lot to say in the story that we are going to tell you.

And it is that one of the things that most attracts the attention of Snapchat is, precisely, its icon. The image that we see for the first time when entering the App Store or the Google Play Store when we download the application. A ghost? Why? What reason is there not to use a photo camera like Instagram or any other element that denotes connection with others, community, conversation, content, etc.?

The first thing to say is that the Snapchat icon is a ghost because Evan Spiegel had the idea of ​​drawing one on a sheet of paper and left it as it was, so it became part of the brand image of the social network. Hence its simplicity, without details or ornaments that could interfere with the main idea of ​​making us see that this shape has to do with a ghost. It is done.

Snapchat logo.

In any case, despite the simplicity that emanates from that drawing of the ghost, it seems that it was inspired by the appearance (as Snapchat’s CEO himself confessed in an interview on Business Insider) of the rapper Ghostface Killah who, at the time, was a renowned member of the Wu-Tang Clan gang. But there is an important detail in this story and that is that this ghost, initially, was not intended to be part of the Snapchat brand image.

Before we have another project

Indeed, Snapchat was not the project that Evan Spiegel wanted to use the ghost for when he picked up a pencil and paper. The destination was Picaboo , which we can consider as the predecessor of the social network that we have today and that would have worked in a very similar way. You know, we publish content that disappears as soon as it is seen, hence the idea that the CEO of the company wanted to convey about a community that sends and receives ghost messages. And since Picaboo didn’t go through with it, it was Snapchat that kept the ectoplasm (in Ghostbusters vocabulary ).

In any case, the logo has gone through different phases : a first one with the shape of the ghost, two eyes and a mocking smile? which lasted until 2013 and, in that year, an elimination of all the interior elements that left only the outline as the valid form that would represent the social network. The last of those modifications would arrive in 2019 and only to make the outer edge of the drawing created by the CEO of Snapchat more visible.