[HN Gopher] Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some...
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users
headaches
Author : dmitryminkovsky
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-08-12 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnet.com)
| dellcybpwr wrote:
| I really dislike the new font. Part of the problem is the spacing
| between characters.
| nakodari wrote:
| I agree, that's what bothering me too. It looks like an
| unfinished font.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Yes! The inconsistent character spacing and the width of the
| downstrokes seem to be at least parts of the problem.
| iKnowKungFoo wrote:
| I like it on desktop, not so much on iOS. The spacing is more
| of an issue for me on mobile.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Would have liked some picture examples... This is like somebody
| typing out what a color looks like.
| scelerat wrote:
| If you don't have twitter on your phone, you can go to
| twitter.com and the new font is active.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Yes but we want a comparison. I check Twitter election to
| election. There is no way for me remember the old font. Let
| alone compare it to this new one.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| This looks very much as if the font renderer is aggressively
| hinting to the pixel grid vertically, but not horizontally.
| That's a known trick for getting a decent compromise between
| crisp text (along the baselines and tops of letters) with
| subpixel horizontal kerning.
|
| I doubt the Android renderer is really broken and no-one has
| noticed until now, so I'd guess the font either has bad hinting,
| or more likely it's just being displayed at an awkward size and
| vertical positions are being rounded in an awkward way. You can
| see the slight deviations from the baseline in the iOS
| screenshots, it's just much more subtle as it isn't being hinted.
|
| (Source: I contributed a little bit to font rendering in Urho3D,
| to fix some similar text aliasing glitches:
| https://github.com/urho3d/Urho3D/issues/1953)
| aj3 wrote:
| Explanation and comparison between platforms:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/mcclure111/status/142590242262759...
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Thanks, that's a great investigation!
|
| So broken hinting it is. Embarrassing that they didn't pick
| it up in testing.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Probably a case of a monoculture of designers and/or
| developers on Retina Displays and Apple's renderer getting
| the benefit of extra pixels per inch of the usual font
| sizes?
|
| This seems really common with tech companies that the fonts
| they like for "crisp" and "light" look great on Retina
| Displays and no one thinks to check any other display or OS
| font renderer. I feel it's also why the designers at so
| many companies right now often accidentally favor (display)
| fonts with hints and weight tuned for headlines, high DPI
| printing, and/or large uses (banners) for places where body
| fonts with thicker weights and better hints for smaller
| font sizes on less pixel dense displays would be much
| better for everyone involved.
|
| (Though some of that belief that it is such a widespread
| problem comes from my bias from ugly personal experience of
| getting designs handed to me from the only macOS users in
| an entire enterprise and having to point out their font
| choices were entirely inappropriate on anyone else's
| displays in the company, and being the only one to point it
| out and easily ignored because I wasn't a designer and what
| did I know.)
| handrous wrote:
| > I doubt the Android renderer is really broken and no-one has
| noticed until now, so I'd guess the font either has bad
| hinting, or more likely it's just being displayed at an awkward
| size and vertical positions are being rounded in an awkward
| way. You can see the slight deviations from the baseline in the
| iOS screenshots, it's just much more subtle as it isn't being
| hinted.
|
| Having developed for Android off and on over the years, I would
| absolutely not _rule out_ the possibility that there 's been a
| really basic problem with font rendering, reported in 2008 and
| repeatedly closed as stale on each version release then re-
| opened, with the most recent "any progress?" post dated 3 weeks
| ago, that everyone's just been quietly working around.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Wow I thought something felt weird when I looked at the screen
| then looked away. I'm not dyslexic or anything but looking at
| Twitter with that font almost makes my head hurt, not kidding.
| mihaic wrote:
| To anyone saying "Users will complain about anything", I'm on a
| Windows desktop and this is honestly the most unpleasant reading
| experience I've had on any big website in recent memory.
|
| There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is
| rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused,
| further straining my eyes.
|
| Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| HN is reliably the worst reading experience I have on the
| internet, exclusively because of the lack of line-wrapping.
| tehbeard wrote:
| No, no no no, atleast the font is crisp and the contrast is
| good on HN.
|
| The line wrapping I can quasi-forgive as this being a place
| for discussion rather than dumping <pre> code blocks.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| I like it. It is hard to read and easy to skip over, which is
| just about perfect for tweets.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I have the newest most expensive (well, not the most expensive,
| but close) M1 MacBook and it's the same.
|
| It's weird how unpleasant it is. The new font seems rather
| nice, and I would not even notice it looks different, but... it
| really hurts to look at.
| zippergz wrote:
| Agreed. You can't blame this on testing only on Macs, because
| it's bad on my Mac too.
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's bad on Mac, it's bad on Windows. What the hell did
| they use to develop and test this where it looked good?
| babelfish wrote:
| Looking good on iOS.
| arrakeen wrote:
| looks fine to me on linux, surprisingly. though i doubt
| that the designers tested on a linux box with a tweaked
| fontconfig
|
| edit: here's a comparison with helvetica
| https://i.imgur.com/BJlHQhf.gif
| chociej wrote:
| CSS is seeing this stack on FF for me: "TwitterChirp",
| -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto,
| Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
|
| I'm getting Roboto on Linux which (a) looks great and (b)
| is very similar to the new font
| city41 wrote:
| Are you actually getting Chirp? Seems some Linux users
| are not. I'm on Chrome on Ubuntu 20 and I do get Chirp,
| and it looks quite bad IMO.
| arrakeen wrote:
| yup TwitterChirp is the computed font according to
| firefox
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Looks good on my S10.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Has to be a BeBox.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I'm on a Mac, and I'm not getting any issues. Perhaps its
| machine or OS version dependent? Or browser dependent?
| [deleted]
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i find the new font absolutely HORRIBLE on desktop. but it's
| quite pleasant on mobile (more specifically, on a galaxy s21).
| wil421 wrote:
| Same on my M1 and iPhone.
| poleguy wrote:
| O, no... the o's render square and then round and then square
| again on xubuntu/chrome... what's up!?!...
|
| https://imgur.com/a/0LcqKej
|
| Many things seem to change because people need to change things
| to rationalize their job title. Is that what's going on here?
| panda888888 wrote:
| This screenshot looks perfectly normal on my computer, or
| maybe I just can't see the difference. All of the o's look
| the same to me. Anybody else...?
| hermitdev wrote:
| The o's look bad, but wtf is up with the e's in that picture?
| NazakiAid wrote:
| Noticed it yesterday and thought the stylesheet had glitched on
| my browser as the font was soo bad but then later on it was
| trending so realised Twitter had just been stupid.
|
| Was getting a headache from it.
|
| This change can be undone for now using this JS: document.cookie=
| "ab_decider=responsive_web_chirp_font_enabled=false&responsive_we
| b_nav_visual_refresh_enabled=false"
| ErikAugust wrote:
| https://trimread.org/articles/210
| franhield wrote:
| The new Twitter font looks so weird, and at the same time, it
| looks quite strong on the eyes. They should revert it to the
| classic one and bring back the fleets.
| moolcool wrote:
| > bring back the fleets
|
| Did anyone use fleets?
| dellcybpwr wrote:
| When it was announced fleets were going away... had to look
| up because had no idea what a twitter fleet
| kps wrote:
| The 'custom' font has been identified1 as Grilli Type _GT
| America_ 2 with minor spacing change and a Twitter logo in the
| PUA.
|
| 1 https://twitter.com/jeffjose/status/1425626162219286529
|
| 2 https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-america
| warent wrote:
| Interestingly that means Twitter text is no longer fully
| portable. If you copy some text from Twitter, you specifically
| need Chirp to render it properly or else characters like their
| special logo character will be broken for all other fonts
|
| Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font
| improperly...
|
| Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm feeling like this is an intentional
| decision in order to push other fonts/foundries to start adding
| the Twitter logo as a standard Unicode character. Basically
| bypassing the need for consensus by just forcing the matter and
| cementing their logo in typography standards.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| So, the same as literally every other font that uses PUA
| (which is the majority of icon fonts).
| sparky_z wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but if the Unicode Consortium even tried to add
| their logo to the specification, wouldn't Twitter have to
| actively sue to stop them or risk having their trademark
| genericized?
|
| Gut check: are there currently any trademarked symbols in
| Unicode? I can't think of any offhand, and it I find it
| difficult to imagine it happening for precisely that reason.
| [deleted]
| srfvtgb wrote:
| Apple has been doing this for a while and it hasn't had much
| effect outside devices which run their software:
| Qub3d wrote:
| Have you ever seen nerd fonts? This is not a new idea at all:
|
| * https://www.nerdfonts.com/
|
| * https://fontawesome.com/
|
| I don't think this will push fonts/foundaries to add the
| twitter logo any more than I feel pushed to use the twitter
| logo in handwriting. Fonts are very nice in that the user
| still enjoys a high level of choice in the matter. Heck, even
| the twitter nonsense could be fixed with a stylus/tampermoney
| script of one or two lines.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| This seems a little paranoid, yes. :) What text do you
| envision copying from Twitter that's going to specifically
| include their special logo character? It's not going to be in
| anybody's tweet text.
|
| > Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font
| improperly...
|
| Uh, isn't putting your own characters in Unicode's private
| use area specifically what that area is for? Isn't that where
| fonts that have dingbats unique to them, for instance, would
| put them?
| xorcist wrote:
| Not likely perhaps, but could this be one way to retain more
| copyright over tweets in the future?
|
| Most companies based on user generated content try to claim
| ownership over it by way of agreements. That has always been
| murky legal territory and it's not easy to know what value
| they have.
|
| If the proper rendering of content was made dependent on
| proprietary fonts, that could be one way to exercise control
| over where that content can be used.
|
| It's not impossible that making users pick proprietary
| emoticons could have economic value. Remember where you heard
| it first...
| OzzyB wrote:
| Yes, welcome to Corporate Typograhism(tm) where big corp takes
| an already existing (copyrighted) font -- change it a little --
| then release it as their own.
|
| Some Copyright is more Copyright than others...
| mikedc wrote:
| The implication that this is a practice being used to skirt
| copyright is wrong. In almost all cases the font foundry is
| commissioned by a company to produce a distinct (or not so
| distinct as the case may be) variant of a typeface/family,
| licensed to them for their use - as an alternative to having
| the foundry create an entirely new typeface from scratch.
| [deleted]
| chociej wrote:
| It's very similar to Roboto. Noticeable differences side by
| side, but very similar.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It looks like they've put a picture of an apple in the Private
| Use Area as well at U+F8FF. Weird; there's no need for the PUA
| there; just pick (heh) U+1F34E (red apple) or U+1F34F (green
| apple).
| SllX wrote:
| That's a holdover from MacRoman.[1] If you're on a Macintosh,
| Option Shift K at least on the standard US layout. Still
| comes up in Apple docs and user forums.
|
| [1] http://www.alanwood.net/demos/macroman.html
| GranPC wrote:
| It's for compatibility with the Apple logo that is displayed
| on iOS devices when that codepoint is rendered.
| jchw wrote:
| > Regardless of whether you're pro or anti Helvetica, I think we
| can all agree that it's not up for the job.
|
| ... we can?
|
| (From
| https://twitter.com/DerritDeRouen/status/1354548649561186306)
| snazz wrote:
| Helvetica definitely was not designed with screens in mind--
| Apple replaced it with San Francisco for both a legibility and
| a brand cohesiveness purpose.
|
| That said, this feels like a weird argument given that Twitter
| didn't use Helvetica on any modern platform when it used system
| fonts. SF Pro, Segoe UI, and Roboto are all designed for
| screens unlike Helvetica.
| jchw wrote:
| Personally, I find Helvetica to be extremely sufficient for
| reading text on screen. Maybe it isn't the best possible
| font, but I think their statement is kind of non-sensical, it
| makes it sound like it would've been a problem to use
| Helvetica... I doubt it.
| dbbk wrote:
| There was one version of macOS where the system UI font was
| Helvetica and it was horrible.
| jchw wrote:
| And iOS, no? I don't recall that being a huge problem.
| zamalek wrote:
| Yeah, that tweet was a definite WTF moment for me. Having to
| explain what cargo culting is to tech folks, is becoming more
| rare for me. Yet we continue to try to summon those gods.
| classichasclass wrote:
| I remember when Chirp was the Twitter Developer Conference. Those
| were very different days.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I'm not the only one!
|
| I thought it's something with antialiasing or whatever on Mac,
| figured out I will solve it later with some setting or whatever.
|
| It literally physically hurts to read it.
| adamrezich wrote:
| is it actually objective qualities of the font that are giving
| people headaches, or is it just because it looks different from
| what the user expects, and twitter users are used to looking at
| twitter many times a day, so it throws their brain for a loop?
| msbarnett wrote:
| While it's hard to _prove_ that this (or anything) directly
| causes headaches, Chirp has an _unusually_ small x-height (stem
| width to x-height ratios would normally be around 1:6 for a
| legible font - Chirp 's ratio is 1:4, very small) and an
| extreme x-height to body height ratio (the capitals are MUCH
| taller than the non-capitals).
|
| The net effect is that even at the same "font size" you have to
| squint more to read anything, because non-capital text is very
| very small and tight relative to the rather large capitals.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Or that the standard response of a large subset of the loudest
| Twitter users is everything they don't like is "literal
| violence."
| marcinzm wrote:
| I don't use twitter that much. I find the font uncomfortable to
| look at on my windows desktop but not my macbook. Especially
| the left hand navigation bar. so, for me, it's not about the
| change but about the font in specific rendering environments.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Windows' font rendering just plain _sucks_ compared to macOS,
| to a point I 'm actually getting headaches. I know,
| subjective anecdata and all of that, but I haven't been able
| to pinpoint _why_ exactly...
| nulbyte wrote:
| I find handles and other bolded text are objectively difficult
| to read. Take a look at a bolded 'e' for a prime example; there
| is not enough whitespace, and the horizontal line is too thin,
| making it all but disappear in the middle of the bold curve.
| twic wrote:
| They should count themselves lucky. Just headaches and not
| seizures? https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/its-
| catching/202007/...
| mbrubeck wrote:
| It seems to have broken hinting on some platforms. Not all
| users are seeing the same rendering. Here's what the broken
| rendering looks like for some:
| https://twitter.com/_Soilleir_/status/1425542928970170376
|
| Differently broken hinting on some versions of Android:
| https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1425545266757779463
| Sunspark wrote:
| Wow, that second link is really bad. I would find it
| enraging.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font.
|
| (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Well, no wonder you are former head of a type foundry. Gotta
| push ya product harder :-P
| browningstreet wrote:
| I have stories. Believe you.. me.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| I was just a bit of tongue in cheek. But who can refuse a
| good story if you wish to share :-)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Why not try, though? First and foremost, I think it's a good
| thing that designers are getting work. I also think huge "for
| fun" webapps are in a particularly advantageous place when it
| comes to pushing the boundaries of design, mostly because they
| have people on hand who can do it and who probably _want_ to do
| it. Next, it 's really a low risk preposition.
|
| Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter
| can push boundaries, though. I wish they'd push boundaries
| more, ala Bertone or Memphis Group, but I guess the risks are
| larger the more you push the boundaries.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts.
| Twitter can push boundaries, though."_
|
| What's the difference between Office and Twitter here? Both
| are apps that should just get out of the way of the content.
|
| Most software should just have native UI that follows the
| platform guidelines. Unfortunately software companies hire
| graphic designers who know nothing about interaction design,
| and generalist programmers who want to do one-size-fits-all
| UIs. And that's how you get unreadable fonts in slow Electron
| apps.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Why not try? Because the cognitive dissonance when people's
| eyes and brains run into a large variety web-based and app-
| based screen fonts. Web based font performance is still
| terrible. So.. because: the brain doesn't like it.
|
| Different presentation fonts in web pages, desktops, etc. can
| start to have the experiential impact of (gui) skins, or non-
| standard dotfiles.
|
| Please note the things I'm leaving out of this... print,
| books, static things, etc.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Twitter's chirp webfont is almost 100k. On optimized sites,
| that can easily be larger then all of the HTML/CSS combined.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| But tens to even hundreds of times smaller than any single
| tweet that has an image in it, so not really a useful
| metric.
| turtlebits wrote:
| That attitude is why web pages have gotten so bloated.
|
| https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts,
| 500k+ of JS)
| turtlebits wrote:
| Actually webbloatscore.com says 2,062 kB and 88 requests.
| mbesto wrote:
| I forget when this has been discussed before but a lot of major
| digital companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) end up
| creating their own fonts for legitimate business reasons that
| are totally unrelated to design/usability. I can't seem to find
| the reference, but I think it had to do with
| licensing/commercial reasons.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| A lot of font foundries switched from one-time lump-sum
| payments to pay-per-use, thinking they'd make a whole bunch
| of money from the scale of big digital companies, and not
| realizing this would just cause these companies to design
| their own fonts instead. Really short-sighted IMO.
| tdeck wrote:
| Adobe is kind of an outlier there since some of their
| earliest commercial products were fonts.
| qkqk wrote:
| Nope, but major brands benefit from their own typeface in
| numerous ways, so Twitter may need their own typeface.
| spicybright wrote:
| How so?
| qkqk wrote:
| Branding! And licensing costs, design, UI consistency,
| obvious reasons covered by Apple and Google when they
| updated their platforms to use them.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Primarily, any license fees your don't have to pay for
| billions of per-use occurrences is money saved. In
| Twitter's case: that's _a lot of money_.
|
| But there's of course also the whole "Your honor, as the
| evidence makes plain, this content/communication is claimed
| to have originated on Twitter, but does not use our
| official typeface. We move to dismiss this case/be awarded
| damages based on the fact that we were not part of _this_
| particular incident ", paired with "Your honor, as the
| evidence makes plain, this content uses our proprietary
| font, but did not originate at twitter. We move to dismiss
| this case because we were not involved/be awarded damages
| on the basis us defamation and will be filing a counter-
| suit for impersonation".
| qkqk wrote:
| That or brand managers want branding.
|
| Do you have real-world examples of the hypothetical you
| invented?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| The number of fonts we have says more about the copyright
| industry than anything else.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I'm sure you know this, but for others: This is a cost-saving
| move.
|
| It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to
| develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay
| per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user
| scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the
| actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by
| copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%,
| tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.
| kn0where wrote:
| They were using built in system fonts on each platform
| before.
| davmar wrote:
| I don't think this is accurate.
|
| If they're just specifying a font (e.g. 'Helvetica') in their
| CSS, it's loaded from the users' machine and doesn't cost
| anything.
|
| Otherwise every site on the internet would be paying fees for
| fonts.
|
| I could be wrong. Please inform me if I am.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes
| of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright
|
| Warning: offer not applicable in UK and most countries in
| EEA. They have the concept of protecting designs there. Japan
| excludes most designs of fonts because of its utilitarian use
| BUT if the font (technically typeface) is distinctive and
| used in a way that can be defended as an artistic choice,
| it's protected under copyright.
| jchw wrote:
| > a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes
| of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright --
| you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing
| or two, and legally call it your own.
|
| IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily
| the US and Japan.
|
| Also, I don't think it's quite that simple either. The actual
| type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the computer
| code describing the particular curves and hinting rules and
| etc. is. So I think you can't just trivially copy a font and
| modify it and call it your own.
| asadkn wrote:
| On MacBook (built-in retina display), it has very similar
| antialiasing to the default UI font SF.
|
| However, the x-height is smaller and that bothers me a bit. If I
| increase the font-size in tweets to 15.5px, it matches old size
| and looks good again.
| Sunspark wrote:
| I routinely override web fonts in Firefox by deselecting "Allow
| pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections
| above". This would solve the desktop web interface. I use Verdana
| a lot for this purpose. Chromium browsers don't seem to have this
| override font option. Now you have found a new reason to love
| Firefox, you're welcome!
|
| For mobile devices, you will have to use a third party app.
|
| Sometimes, the corporately-chosen font is just empirically bad.
| aaomidi wrote:
| The new font is also destroying Arabic and Farsi text. Does
| Twitter not have a single Farsi or Arabic speaking employee?
|
| This is an indication that they really don't value diverse
| employees there. Can't believe no one was like "hey this is
| destroying readability of these two major languages."
| chociej wrote:
| The new font doesn't even have Arabic characters in my browser.
| It just gets rendered in Segoe UI. Which is fine, for what it's
| worth.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| More tweet-based journalism. Isn't there a better article
| somewhere that actually shows the font?
| jrootabega wrote:
| I wonder how many lapsed twitter users started using again
| after reading this, BECAUSE of this.
| zippergz wrote:
| As you said, it is tweet-based. About a font on Twitter. The
| Tweets in the article show the font.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| I have no way of knowing if this was rolled out to 100% of
| users, or if they updated their embedded tweets to use the
| font.
|
| But more importantly I just want to see a side-by-side
| comparison.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Not only that, but when they inevitably change the font
| again, it would be nice to be able to read a then-old
| article to see what the font looked like when it was
| announced.
| city41 wrote:
| Must depend on your device as the tweets are using Proxima
| Nova for me.
|
| edit: although if I click into the tweets and view them on
| Twitter, it then uses Chirp.
| adamrezich wrote:
| additionally, for those that missed it, [CHIRPBIRDICON] in this
| font is ligature'd into the Twitter logo
| rawling wrote:
| ... which, at least for me, then gets a nice red underline for
| being misspelt
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I don't get it. This news is cristal clear to me, at least on my
| one plus 8 pro.
|
| I don't see any blur. I don't get fatigue. I find it quite
| neutral, but easy to read.
|
| Weird.
| jd115 wrote:
| I don't know about Twitter, but HN font (or colours, or spacing,
| I don't know) has always given me headaches. And I almost never
| have headaches otherwise.
| kgin wrote:
| I have a userscript running for HN that bumps up don't size and
| line height
| slothtrop wrote:
| I'm zoomed in 140%, it helps
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I was really pleased when Stack Overflow switched to system fonts
| [0] and hoped this would be a trend. With system fonts there is
| less cognitive load going from app to app. The font stays out of
| your way and serves its purpose best: presenting textual
| information.
|
| Here we have the opposite: Twitter decided that tweet bodies
| should perform a marketing function. They sacrificed utility for
| brand cohesiveness. I understand the motivation, but there's a
| middle ground that serves both purposes: use your own custom font
| for the UI and use a system font for user-generated content.
| Gmail does this: the UI is Roboto, while the default font is
| "Arial, Helvetica".
|
| I'm sure I'll get used to it, but eh.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063991
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The 'brand' needs to differentiate, though. And if Facebook's
| empire does it, so must Twitter.
|
| It seems like when you're VC-backed and get to a certain size,
| one of the items on the checklist is "design custom font that
| looks like every other VC-backed platform's custom font, but is
| slightly different."
|
| Didn't Dropbox also make their own font?
| dunnevens wrote:
| You are correct. They did make their own font. Which seemed
| like a very strange expense to me. Even though I use Dropbox
| heavily, I'll almost never see their font. Dropbox is used
| mostly through the OS's file manager.
| gowld wrote:
| g has an ugly tail, and ? kerning is too small.
|
| cnet's font is kind of ugly, too...
| rconti wrote:
| > All Western-language text now aligns left, making it easier to
| read as you scroll. Non-Western languages remain unchanged.
|
| I'm sorry, this is a change HOW?
| zinekeller wrote:
| Simple flush to the left margin versus justified text, which
| was how Twitter aligns text.
| crazygringo wrote:
| A tweet showing the actual difference as screenshot:
|
| https://twitter.com/Tempo_Storm/status/1425549066377777156
|
| Appears to be a standard-res Windows rendering. (Obviously a
| Retina Mac/iOS rendering will be totally different.)
| dgan wrote:
| Personally i wouldn't be able to tell they re different without
| a hint
|
| Not sure what the fuss is about
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| Personally I wouldn't be able to crisply render the font on a
| low-DPI screen without a hint
| kevinh wrote:
| Some fonts are only subtly different, but this doesn't strike
| me as one of them. Those lower case gs are about as different
| as the letter g can look.
| charwalker wrote:
| The lowercase g is so bad. The lower loop seems to sit a
| bit higher than other lowercase letters bottom out and the
| serifs are odd...
| __david__ wrote:
| That's standard for that style g: https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...
| eminence32 wrote:
| Twitter is not letting me view these images in full without
| logging in. Is that new behavior from twitter?
| Narretz wrote:
| I don't know if it's the quality of the screenshot, but the
| left image (old) looks way more blurry to me then the new one.
| bscphil wrote:
| The screenshots are horrible quality, it's effectively a
| meaningless comparison. (And even if they weren't, comparing
| two fonts using Windows' font rendering is an exercise in
| pointlessness since the heavy hinting destroys small
| differences anyway.)
| ggregoire wrote:
| Those images seem to have the same font (might be the
| resolution/compression) but I just went to twitter.com and I
| saw immediately the difference.
|
| And I'm not even a big user, I visit like once a week for 10
| min. I guess it's even more obvious for people who use it all
| day long.
|
| I wouldn't say it's better or worst, it's probably just a
| matter to get used to it.
| flutas wrote:
| > Those images seem to have the same font (might be the
| resolution/compression)
|
| Check the g, the size of the upper section of the B, the
| width of the o, the comma...
|
| The fonts are completely different.
| [deleted]
| omoikane wrote:
| This change appears to only affect posts in western languages,
| and users with multilingual content end up with a mix of fonts in
| their timeline, which doesn't look all that great.
|
| But at least Twitter did not mix fonts within the same post, I
| guess.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Simple solution, just disable use of custom fonts in browser
| preferences, to force use of configured system fonts.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Note: simple does not imply useful. Plenty of great content out
| there that strongly benefits from telling the browser not to
| use the extremely limited "web safe" fonts, or incredibly ugly
| OS defaults for non-latin content. Let along fonts for
| typesetting maths, or diagrams, or even smart things like
| "temporarily showing scribbles instead of real text, until
| everyone's clicked the "ready to share!" button on their shared
| page experience".
|
| This is the nuclear option: it's simple, and also ensures a
| _terrible_ experience of a web with content based on the fact
| that webfonts are going to work.
| causi wrote:
| You never know when something is going to crop up that causes you
| a headache. Personally, I can't use a phone with curved screen
| edges or a curved monitor without incurring a piercing headache
| after fifteen minutes or so.
| mg wrote:
| An easy way to customize a websites appearance is to add a
| stylesheet via a bookmarklet. For example to set the font to
| Arial, this works:
|
| javascript:document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend','<style>*
| {font-family: arial !important;}</style>')
|
| Using "mono" instead of "arial" also makes for an interesting
| Twitter experience.
| rikkipitt wrote:
| I'm usually terrible at noticing typefaces (especially when
| developing to a design). But now this has been pointed out to me,
| I can't not see it. It's tricky to focus on and I can see why
| people are finding it troublesome...
| epistasis wrote:
| Every UI change forces a cost on your users. It forces them to
| relearn the language of what your buttons mean (the Follow button
| semantics here are atrocious now, and give almost no affordances
| to users about what is going on).
|
| Changes to UI reduce familiarity, and if they are fond of your
| product, that is usually a really bad thing. Having a good friend
| change personality is disturbing and unpleasant!
|
| What is gained from these changes from Twitter, other than some
| employees are able to say they influenced the product? They may
| have tested with some users, but was the testing representative
| of reality? What risk was taken here for what amount of potential
| gain?
| rurp wrote:
| I wish this post was carved in stone in every consumer tech
| office. It is crazy to me how often companies produce negative
| value by redesigning their UI just for the sake of it. It's one
| thing if functionality has changed and you need to make a UI
| change to accomodate it, but reworking the UI for the exact
| same functionality is the equivalent of saying, "Our previous
| design was so bad we needed to burn a bunch of our and our
| customer's resources to recreate it. But trust us, _this_ time
| we 've got a good feeling about it".
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I feel like Basecamp is the only company that gets this right.
| Want to radically redo your UI? Ship a new version and let your
| existing users continue to use the old version.
| helipad wrote:
| Since most of the comments are negative, I will say I noticed the
| new font yesterday and loved it on my Windows computer in Chrome.
|
| I switch between Mac for work and Windows for pleasure and
| Windows font rendering can be hit and miss.
|
| I notice fonts on websites a lot and get frustrated when they're
| bad but this was one of the most pleasant ones I've experienced,
| to the point I went and looked it up. I didn't realize it was a
| modified Grilli Type, I've always enjoyed their fonts so not much
| surprise I liked it.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Can I ask for your resolution + monitor size?
|
| I'm on Windows, and in Chrome and Firefox this new font is a
| pain to read.
|
| ( 1080p / 24" here )
| nkingsy wrote:
| The text of this article is 50% a repeat of the embedded tweets.
|
| It's like high schoolers gaming word counts have taken over
| publishing.
| xwdv wrote:
| Many of these articles could be generated automatically with a
| script using GPT-3. Simply supply a collection of tweets as a
| parameter.
| dtjb wrote:
| I can't stand this "twitter hates x" trend where articles use a
| handful of embedded tweets to make their case, but then you
| look at the engagement on those tweets and they have like 2
| likes. Good job, you found a couple of random people on twitter
| talking to themselves. You can do that for any opinion under
| the sun.
|
| Maybe people really do hate the font, but use some real numbers
| to make your case, not this anecdotal vox pop fluff.
| buu700 wrote:
| Same here. It's like all those sensationalist political /
| culture war articles that frame some out-there fringe idea as
| a mainstream agenda (e.g. "Curry considered racist"). Then
| you actually read past the headline, and it turns out some
| unknown blogger or tweeter was just looking for attention.
|
| Anyone going purely off of headlines, and taking them at face
| value, would have an absolutely bizarre worldview by now.
| zepto wrote:
| Surely that's exactly what happened.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "A few random Twitter users wrote some stuff" is one of my
| least favorite forms of modern journalism.
| adoxyz wrote:
| Yup. This is a non-story. People always complain when popular
| apps get UI updates.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Emblematic of my general disdain for the entire field of Web
| Design/UX/UI, whatever we're calling it these days.
|
| Just let the damn user decide for themselves. It's ridiculous and
| stupid that we can't do this.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| For those who just want to see the font [0,1,2,3] without all the
| fuss:
|
| [0] https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-bold-web.woff [1]
| https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-heavy-web.woff [2]
| https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-medium-web.woff [3]
| https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-regular-web.woff
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The font rendering feels broken on my Windows machine to me. Like
| the designer only tested it on a Mac and didn't account for how
| Windows renders fonts differently.
| Filligree wrote:
| Don't worry, it looks equally bad on my Mac.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chociej wrote:
| It's extremely similar to Roboto, which is how it was rendered
| for me before the change. So it seems almost like nothing
| happened.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| The difference is quite obvious, at least on Windows. Roboto is
| narrower, better hinted, has fewer embellishments, got a better
| consistency ("rhythm") and as a result it's much easier on the
| eyes. Here, side by side - https://i.imgur.com/tXokROR.png -
| Roboto at the top, Chirp at the bottom.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It also seems that chirp has unusually short ascenders and
| larger lobes/bowls. For example the 'h' character looks like
| a child drew it and much closer to an 'n' than one would
| expect.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Even their announcements on design and font updates never show
| screenshots and interactions from the actual site: it's all
| marketing shots and videos.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this change was never tested outside
| Figma/Sketch mockups.
| afrcnc wrote:
| "apparently"
| emodendroket wrote:
| In three months this will all be forgotten.
| Fiahil wrote:
| I was about to dismiss these as complete fabrication and go on
| with my life. However, after looking at the font screenshot, I
| instantly felt a small pinch behind my eyes and at the back of my
| head. Coincidence ? Maybe, but it happened also with my SO and
| some members of the family (without warning them first).
|
| So there might be a problem with this font indeed!
|
| Note: we saw the screenshot on my iphone 12.
| spicybright wrote:
| Same. I genuinely have no idea how something as big as twitter
| could botch this so bad. Is buying one of every majorly used
| device and handing them to a bunch of testers really not worth
| the effort?
| mleonhard wrote:
| Twitter's designers did this because it helps them get promoted
| and earn more money.
| reidjs wrote:
| I personally can't stand reading Twitter, but I do like posting
| jokes and comments for my small group of friends. I built this to
| delegate posting to Twitter via GitHub actions from markdown
| files in the repo. https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-
| scheduler
| insin wrote:
| If you don't like the new font or Follow/Following buttons, my
| browser extension/user script for Twitter can now get rid of
| them, screenshots in the release notes here (the latest Chrome
| version is still pending review at the time of typing):
|
| https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/releases
|
| I tried turning Chirp back on after a full day of coding at work
| and it's even worse when your eyes are starting to get tired,
| genuinely unpleasant to look at (on Windows, at least).
| chociej wrote:
| Yeah the follow buttons confused me for quite a while. I
| thought I was following a bunch of folks at first glance. Then
| I realized they've flipped the sense of outlined/solid buttons!
| albertopv wrote:
| I'm one of those with headache, on my samsung s10e it seems
| blurred, I have to concentrate to read it well.
| pedroma wrote:
| New font looks fine to me. But might be because I don't read
| Twitter every day. Didn't even know if the new font was active
| until I checked the Chrome inspector.
| fsvavsd wrote:
| No screenshot of what new fonts look like, I don't have Twitter
| so cannot see it on twitter.com. It wants me to sign up.
| dellcybpwr wrote:
| View any random account. Here's one:
| https://twitter.com/twitter
| wruza wrote:
| Twitter takes like full two minutes to load in recent years,
| is that normal?
| rconti wrote:
| There's something really strange that happened to me for
| over a year, and it's stopped. I can't remember what it was
| or why. I think using https://twitter.com (without the
| www), forcing https, and using Safari. Some combo of those
| things made the site almost never load properly. Try adding
| in a WWW or a different browser if you're interested.
| MikusR wrote:
| It shows Segoe UI for me
| mdorazio wrote:
| I stared it for a good minute thinking maybe I wasn't being
| served the new font, but no, it's just so similar to
| Helvetica (Roman) that I have to deliberately look for the
| differences to tell. I compared Chirp and Helvetica side by
| side and the only significant differences in the characters
| themselves are in the upper case J, Q, and R, then lower case
| g and the numeral 2.
|
| Am I missing something or is it just that I go to twitter so
| seldom that I assumed it was always Helvetica?
|
| Edit: it seems it's not the font itself, but rather something
| going on with the rendering making it blurrier for some
| people than the previous typeface.
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| This is what user stylesheets were intended to solve. Too bad the
| majority browsers have gone down the path of attempting to remove
| all customisation.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I don't blame the browsers, really.
|
| Look at the source code of Twitter or Facebook. It's
| intentionally obfuscated and mangled, probably in part to fuck
| with ad blockers.
|
| I have a few user stylesheets (even a little custom Firefox
| extension to block one user's comments on a site I frequent),
| but the sites I'd really like to use them on largely don't make
| it possible to do so.
|
| Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's web inspector, for
| example. The "Sponsored" tag is made up of 31 different
| randomly named span tags. https://imgur.com/a/AHZL8ko
| sli wrote:
| * { font-family: 'Verdana, sans-serif !important' }
| pdkl95 wrote:
| It took a while to setup, but fixing the problem in the
| font rendering layer has worked really well. Several years
| ago - after being annoyed by blurry/bad fonts, extremely
| bad hinting, and other font problems - I spent a few weeks
| investigating the way fonts are rendered and a few more
| weeks comparing many different fonts and various
| permutations of rendering/hinting methods. The result of
| all that work included a set of fontconfig files with long
| lists like this; <fontconfig>
| <alias> <family>Arial</family>
| <prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer> </alias>
| <alias> <family>Helvetica</family>
| <prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer> </alias>
| <!-- Many more aliases that --> <!-- force fonts
| to Ubuntu. --> <alias> <family>sans-
| serif</family>
| <prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer> </alias>
| </fontconfig>
|
| This way, my font overrides happen in any software that
| uses fontconfig (i.e. most X11 software that uses TrueType
| fonts). $ fc-match Helvetica
| Ubuntu-R.ttf: "Ubuntu" "Regular"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28typeface%29
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, and I can do that, at least in Firefox.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-
| th...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume any problem or slowness I have with a website on
| Safari in MacOS or iOS using a content blocker is due to the
| website wanting to track me or otherwise for advertisement
| purposes.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Even with user stylesheets targeting elements reliably on
| social networks is a nightmare. We're approaching a future
| where the markup isn't even human readable.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| I cannot even install fonts on Android.
| megous wrote:
| You don't need to use website font's. You can configure the
| browser to use your chosen fonts. It's a normal accessibility
| option on the browser config page.
|
| The only problem is devs who use fonts for icons, which is as
| stupid as it sounds.
|
| https://megous.com/dl/tmp/0199107a482b8f75.png
|
| (It would be nice to also have minimum font weight setting, not
| just minimum size, because some designers just can't be helped
| and use <=200. Then most of the issues with typography on the
| web would be solved.)
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| User stylesheets are a relic of Web 1.0, when the web was a
| series of hyperlinked documents.
|
| The transformation from web page to web application was not
| compatible with things like user stylesheets.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, most stylesheets nowadays look like they are generated
| by a compiler. Certainly not human-readable.
| kixiQu wrote:
| The business model where you need to stop your users from
| hiding ads was not compatible with things like user
| stylesheets. If CSS compilation didn't obfuscate class names
| and such, it'd be quite compatible.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Oh yeah I don't mean there's a technological reason it's
| not possible, it's just at odds with the new controlling
| faction of the web.
|
| Time was the web was for everyone, and enthusiasts were the
| main stakeholders.
|
| Now the web is just another marketplace run by
| corporations.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Apparently there are problems with the font hinting which is why
| it looks bad on Windows. Folks are still figuring it out, but see
| e.g. https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1425892769550245888
| ori_b wrote:
| Disabling web fonts works. It speeds up page load, and let's you
| pick fonts that you find readable.
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-web-fonts/...
| jnovek wrote:
| I'm a visually impaired individual with moderate disability -- I
| can use tools like custom typefaces and zooming to manage most of
| my needs but I rarely use screen readers as well.
|
| Personally, the main difficulty I have with the typeface is the
| kerning -- the minimum space between two letters. I don't know
| how these things are measured, if it really is as tight as it
| looks, but subjectively it feels like surprisingly little space.
| It's much harder for me to read than Neue Helvetica.
| thrower123 wrote:
| It feels like I'm developing heatstroke, or looking at a
| particularly unsettling black-and-white prison uniform.
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