It's extremely similar to Roboto, which is how it was rendered for me before the change. So it seems almost like nothing happened.
Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
81–90 of 264 posts
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#82Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)
The number of fonts we have says more about the copyright industry than anything else.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#83To 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.
Same on my M1 and iPhone.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#84The ‘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
It's very similar to Roboto. Noticeable differences side by side, but very similar.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#85If 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).
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#86Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)
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.
Adobe is kind of an outlier there since some of their earliest commercial products were fonts.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#87Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)
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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#88is 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?
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.