In the newspaper industry, whenever there seemed to be a lull in the business, they used to go for layout design overhaul and font changes. And that bug seems to have bitten Twitter too, which has unleashed font and style change on its platform. And as ever on Twitter, the negative feedback to it has been voluble, but actually amounting to nothing.
For, as irony would have it, criticisms of the new Twitter font are being rendered on the very same font.
High contrast and less visual clutter
But first things first, what are the new changes even if they are cosmetic? Well, Twitter has come up with Chirp, its first proprietary typeface. Twitter said: “All Western-language text now aligns left, making it easier to read as you scroll. Non-Western languages remain unchanged.” Twitter introduced Chirp font in January as part of its branding update.
Twitter added that it has updated its colours to be high contrast and a lot less blue. This is being done to draw attention to the photos and videos that appear on the timeline.
The microblogging platform, in a bid to give a fresh palette, is also planning to add new colours soon.
Twitter’s new buttons now sport a high contrast and the platform has cleaned up a lot of visual clutter, too.
“There are fewer gray backgrounds and unnecessary divider lines. We also increased space to make text easier to read,” it said.
Feedback has been scathing, but that’s nothing to worry
Twitter: let’s change the font on everything todayUs: refreshing our page every second to see if it goes back to the original one#TwitterFont pic.twitter.com/aySe1RFUWXAugust 11, 2021
As it always happens on Twitter to any change, the response was swift and scathing. People let black humour and snark splash across their timelines as they trashed the new font and design.
“Ok but is anyone else getting a slight headache from the Twitter font change or just me,” said one user going by the handle @tuxedomakscos.
Another user, @lunetsdaya said: “the new twitter font has cured my addiction to this bird app because i actually can’t scroll without getting a headache now.”
But it may be recalled that when Twitter moved from 140 character limit to 280 characters, the popular response was even more fierce and frontal. But after a few days everything died down, and the 280 character limit has been fully embraced now.
So, Chirp has nothing to worry, after all. It is here to stay till the next cycle when Twitter goes for another font change for users to freshly outrage about.