The Secret To Why Facebook’s Places Logo Has A 4 In It

-Places Logo- If you thought Facebook was copying Google and Foursquare with their new Places logo, think again. Aaron Sittig, the lead designer at Facebook, posted a coy response yesterday on Quora claiming that they “could only wish we’d been so clever.” Whether or not placing the four in the logo or using Google’s places pin (found here) was intentional, it’s pretty clear that the images “subconsciously” appeared at a minimum.

Here’s Aaron’s full response which was first posted on Quora:

I drew this icon.

Originally we had two straight roads crossing each other, but the icon looked too much like a package with ribbon around it. We tried adding water at one edge of the icon but this complicated the map and distracted from the Place droplet shape. Our solution was to add a bend in one of the roads.

I recall some jokes about the roads looking like the Facebook ‘f’ rotated 90 degrees, but no one noticed that the roads formed the number 4. We sure got a laugh from the news stories, but could only wish we’d been so clever.