This morning, as per our morning routine, we logged on to Twitter.com only to be met with something new.
That something is a new font being used by the platform it calls Chirp. Chirp was first announced back in January and if you’re curious about the design process you can read more in this thread.
Now Twitter says that the reason it changed its font is to make the platform more accessible but we have something of an issue here. To be clear this problem is specific to us and how we use Twitter but it’s worth mentioning.
We generally split half-screen windows across two displays so that we have four windows open at any given time. The problem with this, especially with Twitter, is that the real estate browsers give you in this aspect ratio is rather minimal so we zoom out so that more elements can be seen without having to scroll left and right. Generally we stick to an 80 percent zoom as text is still clear and legible but with this new Twitter font we’ve found ourselves having to squint.
In the images above you can see that Twitter’s new font is decidedly more hazy than Facebook’s at the same zoom level. We should point out that this was not a problem before Twitter rolled out this font update.
There are many users below Twitter Design’s thread complaining about the new font as well as Twitter’s other new design features.
The “Follow” button is now Black (or white in Dark Mode) and switches to White (or black in Dark Mode) when you follow somebody.
“Our new buttons are high contrast too,” writes the Twitter Design team. “Now the most important actions you can take stand out. Yes, the follow buttons look different, but they’ll help you see what actions you’ve taken at a glance.”
The general impression we’re seeing is that Twitter users are not fans of these changes. Usually we’d say that Twitter is unlikely to change this but given how many folks are complaining about being unable to simply read tweets, we have to think that Twitter is going to take this criticism seriously.
We understand the draw of using your own bespoke font to cement your brand’s identity but when your brand is used by 330 million people every month, design changes like this really require a bit more testing before being implemented for everybody.
