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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

#171

Post by panda888888 »

poleguy wrote: post #123
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.

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?

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...?

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

#172

Post by eminence32 »

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.)

Twitter is not letting me view these images in full without logging in. Is that new behavior from twitter?

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

#173

Post by omoikane »

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.

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

#174

Post by OzzyB »

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

Yes, welcome to Corporate Typograhism™ 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...

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

#175

Post by jnovek »

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.

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

#176

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

kixiQu wrote: post #61
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#177

Post by browningstreet »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #93
browningstreet wrote: post #25

Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)

Well, no wonder you are former head of a type foundry. Gotta push ya product harder :-P

I have stories. Believe you.. me.

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

#178

Post by browningstreet »

dfxm12 wrote: post #43
browningstreet wrote: post #25

Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)

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 ca…

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.

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

#179

Post by geerlingguy »

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…

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?

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

#180

Post by xorcist »

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…

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...

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