Twitter's New Font, Chirp, Is Apparently Giving Some Users Headaches (cnet.com) 77
On Wednesday, Twitter unveiled a new design that includes a new font, called Chirp, and higher-contrast colors. "Almost immediately, users began to complain -- with many saying the new font gave them headaches," reports CNET. From the report: "Today, we released a few changes to the way Twitter looks on the web and on your phone," a tweet from Twitter Design reads. "While it might feel weird at first, these updates make us more accessible, unique, and focused on you and what you're talking about." Twitter's Derrit DeRouen posted an entire thread about why the company felt a need to develop its own typeface, writing that, "for everyday use it must be sharp and legible (with good density), but with personality and distinctiveness."
But some found Chirp harder to read. "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let us change the font back," said one Twitter user. "It's incredibly difficult for me to read with, and it physically hurts to look at it." Said another, "It looks like the letters are doing the wave, I hate it." A number of Twitter users made the same point: The new font is giving them headaches. "The new Twitter font has cured my addiction to this bird app because i actually can't scroll without getting a headache now," wrote one user. "Read tweets with Twitter's new font and get a headache," one person wrote. "Then maybe you'll close your eyes out of frustration and eventually fall asleep." A Twitter spokesperson told CNET, "We tested the font and found that while it does take people a little time to get used to it, overall they like the change. We're listening to feedback about the font and will continue to improve it."
But some found Chirp harder to read. "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let us change the font back," said one Twitter user. "It's incredibly difficult for me to read with, and it physically hurts to look at it." Said another, "It looks like the letters are doing the wave, I hate it." A number of Twitter users made the same point: The new font is giving them headaches. "The new Twitter font has cured my addiction to this bird app because i actually can't scroll without getting a headache now," wrote one user. "Read tweets with Twitter's new font and get a headache," one person wrote. "Then maybe you'll close your eyes out of frustration and eventually fall asleep." A Twitter spokesperson told CNET, "We tested the font and found that while it does take people a little time to get used to it, overall they like the change. We're listening to feedback about the font and will continue to improve it."
I doubt it's the font (Score:5, Insightful)
More like the *content* of Twitter is causing headaches.
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And Slashdot acts like a laxative.
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It's more Pepto Bismol.
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high contrast colors in web pages and fonts will cause severe eye strain headaches in some people with astigmatism, which about half the US population has to some degree or other.
Same issue has been reported with "dark mode" on cell phones and monitors.
Re: I doubt it's the font (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I doubt it's the font (Score:4, Insightful)
They will have to justify their salaries. Eventually the app is functional enough that the only thing left to do is to reinvent the wheel.
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It's not better, it's just different. They want to differentiate their brand visually, especially now that there are Twitter clones like Parler and Gettr.
A proprietary font makes it clear that a post is from Twitter, not a rival, especially when embedded on another page or shown in a screenshot.
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A while ago Microsoft presented the new fonts for the next versions of Office but I think it's fair to say that they just want to give Office documents a distinctive look not that the fonts plug any gaps that the existing fonts didn't.
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Why do they think they can do better?
Define "better". The "high quality" fonts you are exposed to on a daily basis are purely centered around licensing agreements for certain fonts and OS defaults. Nothing more. There are literally thousands of fonts you have never seen that do the job just as well as the fonts we already have while providing a form of artistic license to the user of the font.
Your post is the typesetting equivalent of 640k aught to be enough for everyone.
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I have astigmatism and I don't see any issues with that font. To me it's clear and sharp.
It's still a lot better than the darn fonts that many sites uses today with uneven width of the characters that makes them look like crap and THAT gives me a headache.
Did you design the font? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cause it sure looks like it was created by a person with blurred eyesight.
It is deliberately designed to be NOT anti-aliased even at maximum enlargement. .jpeg and pasted into another image. .jpegs on his phone, and doesn't know what that anti-aliasing thing is for anyway.
Smaller type-size appears as if it is missing edges - like a color-selected text copied from a
Enlarged, same text is clearly jagged to the point of wandering if one is looking at an artifact from the early '90s or at work of some intern who learned his "deezine skeelz" watching youtube videos and browsing low-res
On the other hand, maybe that's on purpose.
All that ugly and hard to read extra jaggedness probably looks a lot better after several copy/paste cycles of screenshots.
But I can easily see how it could cause headache to someone who's eyes actually pick up all that "extra crispness" as what it really is - information distortion. [wikipedia.org]
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I thought the conventional wisdom on slashdot was to decry the proliferation of low-contrast, hard to read colors on web sites. I find grey text way harder on my eyes than black text. I use Stylus to increase the contrast on every web site I view regularly, including this one.
The examples of the font in the article looked fine to me. No issues. They look sharp to me, but not jagged. Looking on Twitter's site, I am hard pressed to notice an overall difference in readability. The whole thing looks like r
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Hubris (Score:4, Informative)
" Look everybody - we decided to change the font, because we decided it was better; so a giant middle finger to you if you don't like our decision, because 'courage', right? "
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" Look everybody - we decided to change the font, because we decided it was better; so a giant middle finger to you if you don't like our decision, because 'courage', right? "
When you're the product, you'll take what you're given and you'll like it.
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When you're the product, you'll take what you're given and you'll like it.
Then I guess this means in Apple's case, you're actually paying to be the product.
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Re:Hubris (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to moderate your comment as well, but I'll reply instead.
The reason people are pushing back against you is that it's entirely lacking in any sort of empathy. Remember that not everyone is like you. Some have poor eyesight, some have better eyesight, some wear high-prescription glasses. Some users run their devices with fonts scaled up, some with fonts scaled down. You dismiss all of this with a wave of your hand and a dismissive "whiners".
Guess what - accessibility in computing is important. Decades ago larger software companies did real studies with actual behavioral scientists and statisticians to determine if their designs were usable by as many people as possible. They provided settings that people could use to adjust size, contrast, colors so that people were able to find something that worked, for them.
Not anymore. Today it's design and usability by dictatorial fiat. "Designers" make changes to suit a personal preference, to follow a cargo cult, to justify their employment, or just because they're bored. Does a quarter of the population have a hard time reading that 3:1 text contrast ratio? Well fuck them - low contrast is hip.
As others pointed out, we have hundreds of very polished and proven typefaces, but Twitter decided to forge their own path. Okay, fine, that's what innovation requires sometimes. But then they gave every single one of their users a massive "fuck you" by not allowing them to adjust or opt-out of those changes if it doesn't work for them. It could have been a slower, more iterative collaboration between Twitter and their users, but Twitter was more worried about their "brand".
And every minor UI change will result in some whiners. The problem with Twitter, at least UI wise, isn't the font, it's the functionality changes they force on people
A user interface change is a functional change. How you interact with software influences everything else. Or perhaps you think that forcing the Wingdings font would also be fine?
*slow clap* (Score:2)
Looks the same to me (Score:1)
I just went to the website and it looks the same to me. Maybe I don't use Twitter enough to notice the difference or maybe the font doesn't work on Firefox/Linux? I don't know.
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I just went to the website and it looks the same to me.
Same here [postimg.cc]. I wonder what it could be.
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I'm not seeing the new font on Chrome/Windows. Perhaps it's a regional thing? Or maybe they've already reverted it?
Fuck, did they even bother to do user testing? (Score:4, Interesting)
The font should have been aborted.
Who thought that putting low-contrast static into the body of a font would be a good idea? What were they trying to do, create something even worse than ?
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Fortunately browsers allow for plugins and extensions so this is a simple problem to solve.
Re:Fuck, did they even bother to do user testing? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Fuck, did they even bother to do user testing? (Score:4, Funny)
I voted for Zapf Dingbats!
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Does anyone do testings these days? :P
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Maybe they did user testing like Youtube does user testing - pick a random bunch of users, don't tell them they're getting a beta version with some changes, don't ever ask them if they noticed or disliked the changes, call it a success if they visit youtube again.
Death to embedded fonts! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, call me a crotchety old man, but the whole being able to specify specific font faces and sizes needs to die in a fire. I don't care that you're obsessed with some font with all kinds of weird loops and swirls and other useless affectations. I don't want to have to adjust my zoom level on the browser with every page I go to because one page is designed by someone with better than 20/20 vision who just assumes everyone else does too while the next page is designed by someone who can barely make out individual fingers on their own hand without glasses that they never wear. I also prefer serif fonts because I get tired of having to figure out if something is an upper-case I or a lower-case l, among other graphical similarities. If others like sans-serif, fine, as long as I can use serif I don't really care if someone learned to read wingdings.
Let me pick a font I like, at a size that works for me. Proportional size tags are fine, since it allows the browser to reflow the layout based on the client resolution/window size, but this mandating a font be a specific size and assuming everyone is running exactly the same resolution display as the site designer bullshit has got to go. I don't give a shit about your "artistic vision" for the site. What good is that to me when the info that I want, which is my whole reason for being there in the first place, is completely inaccessible because of your "artistic vision"?
Re:Death to embedded fonts! (Score:5, Informative)
I realized problems were afoot when in the late 1990s, some friends of mine who were designers and page layout artists, came to me asking if there was some way to lock in how a web page appeared, so that every visitor got a page which looked exactly the same. I told them that contradicted the entire purpose of the web and sent them away. But soon afterwards, I ran across the first Flash website - it couldn't be resized or rescaled, you couldn't change the font sizes, you couldn't change the fonts, you couldn't even change the colors. The way it appeared was exactly and only the way the website designer wanted it to appear.
I was hoping it was a temporary thing, but all it's done is spread. For some reason, a large number of creative people get their rocks off controlling how you and I have to view content or services they create. It's led to all sorts of stupidity like Microsoft forcing everyone to use their Ribbon in Office, Apple and Google enforcing a certain UI appearance theme (and only adding a dark mode after more than a decade of users begging for it), and yes Twitter controlling the font used for tweets. Just put your damn content out there, and don't get in the way of me modifying how it appears on MY screen.
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So today - kill CSS and the problem is solved?
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It's not anyone getting their rocks off about control. It's about how the audience perceives the website.
People like pretty, well-designed things. Full stop.
The idea of leaving the presentation entirely up to the browser was a noble ideal. But the Web would never have never become ubiquitous if it was constrained to mid-90s, pre-CSS design principles. Websites that l
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It's not anyone getting their rocks off about control. It's about how the audience perceives the website.
I think its more designers want something to look a certain way and they just can't handle dynamic environments where they can't control every parameter and literally every pixel. Like all disciplines the sensibilities and interests of designers are not aligned with the value users get from their work.
None of this is a technical flaw, mind you.
But rather the realities of putting up with the wetware that makes up the users. If you want your site to be seen by a large audience, then it needs to look good. And that means website designers need to have some ability to control how a web page is viewed. The current paradigm, in turn, is a pretty good compromise on giving designers some control without turning the web into a chain of PDFs.
A chain of PDFs is preferable to the "mobile first" bootstrap bullshit that passes for progress today. At least I can read PDFs just as easily on mobile as I can desktop. What's really sad is the sheer volu
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The entire point of the world wide web was that you could put information out there on your website, and the site visitor's browser would display that information in a format which best suited the viewer.
The important word here is information. The typesetting is just a means of presenting information in an easily readable format. If the typesetting and page presentation become any more important than that, it might indicate that the content is relatively worthless.
Regarding typefaces for online reading, my preference is generally for readability, not fancy style. How readable a typeface is depends on quite a few factors, such as display resolution and type rendering quality, and user preferences and expecta
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and yet we still have resizable windows, windows without scroll bars, and windows you can't copy text out of.
When you combine all 3 of these you get error popups with 2K of error message in a 2"x2" popup that you can't extract the text from.
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NON-resizable..
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Fucking with user font preferences needed to die in a fire about 20 years ago. The meme back in the "Web 2.0" days was what I called "85/85"... 85% size for body text and 85% gray, usually on a 15% (or darker) background. For sites I read regularly, I have CSS overrides which contain a bunch of "default !important" to turn off this kind of stupidity. The font size setting in the browser should be the setting for body text size. If a user wants it smaller, it can be changed. And this isn't just a "my eyes su
Damn Apple. (Score:3, Informative)
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Twitter won't let you change the weight or size of it, therefor it is a font and not a typeface.
Fake consumer acceptance testing? (Score:5, Funny)
You have to wonder if the CAT is real or not. Maybe it is real, but not well done.
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"+1 Would do again"
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Maybe it was Schrödinger's CAT. You won't know whether it makes people sick 'til you let them barf on the carpet... or something like that.
Fix for Firefox on the web (Score:3, Informative)
this will stop Firefox from rendering custom downloadable web fonts and use your onboard fonts instead
navigate to..
about:config
search for..
gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled
double click it and and set it to false
done, no fancy fonts.
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Not quite (Score:3)
Twitter's Derrit DeRouen posted ... "for everyday use it must be sharp and legible (with good density), but with personality and distinctiveness."
It must be sharp and legible. The "personality and distinctiveness" part aren't needed -- they're just vanity.
Smudges are distinct and personal, but you usually can't read them -- and reading is what most people do on Twitter...
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Fark. Blast from the past. I haven't listened to Mastodon in ages. Have they released a new album?
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Want to take slashdot beta for a spin again?
15 minutes of fame for the Twitter manager (Score:4, Insightful)
That is all that is driving these silly changes.
Just 1 manager trying to get applauded for his design changes that no customer had ever asked for.
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This bullshit has been going on since at least 20 years ago when so-called "UX" people who wanted to show off (or at least to have something for their annual stack ranking review) would constantly fuck with a web site's layout. For some reason, back then everybody wanted to use body text 85% size / font color 85% gray. I hated it then, and I would hate it now if I didn't use all the overrides I can find. Basically, change for its own sake is more important than usability to these morons, who tend to have pe
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First World Problems (Score:2)
This is ... (Score:2)
The new gods... (Score:4, Funny)
It seems UX/UI designers are the new gods among developers. Something that shouldn't need a full time team because, in order to justify their paycheck, the UI must always need improving, even with it doesn't. They're like the business majors of Computer Science -- all book learning with no practical experience, but whatever they say is the word of god and.... Squirrel!
Re:The new gods... (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems UX/UI designers are the new gods among developers.
Elsewhere on Slashdot, there was a recent discussion about why applications are steadily getting crappier. Basically, it is people justifying their continued employment by pointless twiddling with a product that already works.
By the way, I am all in favour of genuine marketing, where effort is put into finding out what users actually want, and what they might find useful in the future. Very often, users actually want stuff that works like it always used to. That implies incremental improvement of an already good product, rather than revolutionary change. But that is too boring for the people who want to show off their talents.
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Why on god's green earth no choice? (Score:1)
Would you not let people choose the font and fontsize for an application?
This is incredibly arrogant on their part.
We tested the font... (Score:3)
Translation: We spent too much money on it to admit our mistake.
Seriously: Get a life! (Score:1)
How little of a life do you need to have, to consider a *font* to be a problem??
Headaches?? Can't even handle a different *font*?
The guys down a mine shaft somewhere in Alaska or Siberia be like: Is this a joke??
First people on the moon, deep sea divers, people testing new medicine for the first time, or everyone who ever explored anything new or did any tough job: Are you fucking kidding me?
Such people need a therapy to even become people.
I recommend one month at a farm during busy season. Up at 5, milking
Change (Score:1)
"Hey, we need to change something." "Why?" "Because new is good." "Ok, just change the font then."
Why more than two fonts? (Score:2)
Don't bullshit us (Score:2)
First off, I don't use Twitter so this is all academic to me. And I kind of like the new font. But the article quotes a tweet from Twitter Design as saying, "While it might feel weird at first, these updates make us more accessible, unique, and focused on you and what you're talking about."
No. Imma stop you right there. If you're dictating the use of a particular font, any font, you're not focused on accessibility and the user. If you focus on those things the only possible conclusion is that you need