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

cnet.com

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

#151

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

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

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

#152

Post by davmar »

spoonjim wrote: post #87
browningstreet wrote: post #25

Not 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 virtu…

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.

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

#153

Post by handrous »

iainmerrick wrote: post #148

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…

> 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.

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

#155

Post by bpodgursky »

mihaic wrote: post #33

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.

HN is reliably the worst reading experience I have on the internet, exclusively because of the lack of line-wrapping.

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

#156

Post by SllX »

Freak_NL wrote: post #112
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

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).

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

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #151

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 underst…

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by snazz »

jchw wrote: post #92

> 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 )

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.

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

#160

Post by __david__ »

charwalker wrote: post #147
kevinh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's standard for that style g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...
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