Truth be told, I legitimately had no idea they were using a new font until I saw this thread. I genuinely have barely noticed most of the all the changes they made to Twitter, and it took me a...
Truth be told, I legitimately had no idea they were using a new font until I saw this thread. I genuinely have barely noticed most of the all the changes they made to Twitter, and it took me a while to notice they made any changes at all. Needless to say, seeing people complain about things I didn't know existed kinda left me a bit confused.
I'm not on twitter much and read this before I actually saw the new font in action. Wow, I genuinely hate it! I thought this is mostly just people disliking something new and thus unfamiliar, but...
I'm not on twitter much and read this before I actually saw the new font in action. Wow, I genuinely hate it! I thought this is mostly just people disliking something new and thus unfamiliar, but I actually have trouble reading new twitter. No dyslexia or photosensitivity, either. It flows really weird.
It's interesting as it's nearly the same font as they used to have, but changed to make it their own. But they messed up somewhere and 1. made it hard to read and 2. used it in the body text...
It's interesting as it's nearly the same font as they used to have, but changed to make it their own. But they messed up somewhere and 1. made it hard to read and 2. used it in the body text instead of just headings.
And speaking of high contrast: for me that makes text look blurry, especially with sharp white text on a black background. Light gray on dark gray works fine, increase the contrast and suddenly l can't see a thing.
The most jarring change is the follow/unfollow button: who the hell thinks it's a good idea to suddenly just invert the behavior of a common function??
And finally: accessibility is for everyone. You don't have to be impaired to benefit from accessibility functions.
At a glance and only halfway through my first cup of tea of the day I'd say the letter spacing is a bit fucked which often make things look wrong. But it looks like Chirp has some rather deeper...
At a glance and only halfway through my first cup of tea of the day I'd say the letter spacing is a bit fucked which often make things look wrong. But it looks like Chirp has some rather deeper issues as well which may not be apparent at first glance.
The thing about type design is that it's incredibly hard and involved work. Designing good looking letterforms, sure - any good graphical creative can do that. Most people on a graphic design course will have to design a set of letters/punctuation. But turning those letterforms into a working, highly readable font with all the kerning, hinting and scaling rules is a whole different ballgame. Taking a well known and well developed typeface and tweaking it was a good idea by Twitter, it just seems like they did that tweaking really badly.
This is precisely the kind of thing where a design team will say "we need X large amount of time/money to get this right" and an underclued management will assume because they've seen letters it can't be that complicated and can they have it done by the end of the week please..
People are digging deep into TTF bytecode in trying to find what makes it looks so inconsistent. Seems like the hinting is off or might have been lost in an editing step. It's weird. I actually...
People are digging deep into TTF bytecode in trying to find what makes it looks so inconsistent. Seems like the hinting is off or might have been lost in an editing step. It's weird.
I actually suspect it's the letters just looking too similar. "a", "e" and "s" having the exact same proportions and flow which makes letters melt into each, making their kerning feel more narrow and cramped than it really is. You actually need to subconsciously parse each letter more carefully since they're so similar. That issue would be consistent with something I remember reading about type design (it was from a famous type designer, unfortunately I forgot who it was): Unlike in most other aspects of graphic design, in type design, consistency can be a bad thing since the more different letters are to each other, the easier they are to distinguish and thus read. It feels like they fell for that trap.
Truth be told, I legitimately had no idea they were using a new font until I saw this thread. I genuinely have barely noticed most of the all the changes they made to Twitter, and it took me a while to notice they made any changes at all. Needless to say, seeing people complain about things I didn't know existed kinda left me a bit confused.
I'm not on twitter much and read this before I actually saw the new font in action. Wow, I genuinely hate it! I thought this is mostly just people disliking something new and thus unfamiliar, but I actually have trouble reading new twitter. No dyslexia or photosensitivity, either. It flows really weird.
It's interesting as it's nearly the same font as they used to have, but changed to make it their own. But they messed up somewhere and 1. made it hard to read and 2. used it in the body text instead of just headings.
And speaking of high contrast: for me that makes text look blurry, especially with sharp white text on a black background. Light gray on dark gray works fine, increase the contrast and suddenly l can't see a thing.
The most jarring change is the follow/unfollow button: who the hell thinks it's a good idea to suddenly just invert the behavior of a common function??
And finally: accessibility is for everyone. You don't have to be impaired to benefit from accessibility functions.
At a glance and only halfway through my first cup of tea of the day I'd say the letter spacing is a bit fucked which often make things look wrong. But it looks like Chirp has some rather deeper issues as well which may not be apparent at first glance.
The thing about type design is that it's incredibly hard and involved work. Designing good looking letterforms, sure - any good graphical creative can do that. Most people on a graphic design course will have to design a set of letters/punctuation. But turning those letterforms into a working, highly readable font with all the kerning, hinting and scaling rules is a whole different ballgame. Taking a well known and well developed typeface and tweaking it was a good idea by Twitter, it just seems like they did that tweaking really badly.
This is precisely the kind of thing where a design team will say "we need X large amount of time/money to get this right" and an underclued management will assume because they've seen letters it can't be that complicated and can they have it done by the end of the week please..
People are digging deep into TTF bytecode in trying to find what makes it looks so inconsistent. Seems like the hinting is off or might have been lost in an editing step. It's weird.
I actually suspect it's the letters just looking too similar. "a", "e" and "s" having the exact same proportions and flow which makes letters melt into each, making their kerning feel more narrow and cramped than it really is. You actually need to subconsciously parse each letter more carefully since they're so similar. That issue would be consistent with something I remember reading about type design (it was from a famous type designer, unfortunately I forgot who it was): Unlike in most other aspects of graphic design, in type design, consistency can be a bad thing since the more different letters are to each other, the easier they are to distinguish and thus read. It feels like they fell for that trap.