Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, no wonder you are former head of a type foundry. Gotta push ya product harder :-P
I have stories. Believe you.. me.
I was just a bit of tongue in cheek. But who can refuse a good story if you wish to share :-)
Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
181–190 of 264 posts
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
But tens to even hundreds of times smaller than any single tweet that has an image in it, so not really a useful metric.
That attitude is why web pages have gotten so bloated. https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts, 500k+ of JS)
Actually webbloatscore.com says 2,062 kB and 88 requests.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#183I 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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#184The ‘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...
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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#185> 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.
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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#186is 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?
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
Wow, that second link is really bad. I would find it enraging.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#187Not 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…
> 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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#188This 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…
Explanation and comparison between platforms: https://mobile.twitter.com/mcclure111/status/142590242262759...
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#189The ‘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 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.
Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
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