Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 264 posts

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#141

Post by [deleted] »

flutas wrote: post #139
ggregoire wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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]

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#142

Post by lemoncucumber »

dgan wrote: post #91
crazygringo wrote: post #70

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.)

Personally i wouldn't be able to tell they re different without a hint Not sure what the fuss is about

Personally I wouldn’t be able to crisply render the font on a low-DPI screen without a hint

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#143

Post by ceejayoz »

sli wrote: post #64
ceejayoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

* { font-family: 'Verdana, sans-serif !important' }

Sure, and I can do that, at least in Firefox.

https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-th...

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#144

Post by Qub3d »

warent wrote: post #126
kps wrote: post #34

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

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/found…

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.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#145

Post by bart_spoon »

jaywalk wrote: post #45
zippergz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. You can't blame this on testing only on Macs, because it's bad on my Mac too.

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?

I'm on a Mac, and I'm not getting any issues. Perhaps its machine or OS version dependent? Or browser dependent?

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#146

Post by spicybright »

Fiahil wrote: post #111

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.

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?

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#147

Post by charwalker »

kevinh wrote: post #100
dgan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally i wouldn't be able to tell they re different without a hint Not sure what the fuss is about

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.

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...

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#148

Post by iainmerrick »

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)

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#149

Post by rurp »

epistasis wrote: post #76

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…

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".

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#150

Post by kgin »

jd115 wrote: post #68

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.

I have a userscript running for HN that bumps up don’t size and line height
Post reply on HN