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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

#191

Post by iainmerrick »

aj3 wrote: post #188
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…

Explanation and comparison between platforms: https://mobile.twitter.com/mcclure111/status/142590242262759...

Thanks, that’s a great investigation!

So broken hinting it is. Embarrassing that they didn’t pick it up in testing.

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

#192

Post by dbbk »

jchw wrote: post #185
snazz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was one version of macOS where the system UI font was Helvetica and it was horrible.

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

#193

Post by dunnevens »

geerlingguy wrote: post #179
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?

You are correct. They did make their own font. Which seemed like a very strange expense to me. Even though I use Dropbox heavily, I'll almost never see their font. Dropbox is used mostly through the OS's file manager.

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

#194

Post by WorldMaker »

iainmerrick wrote: post #191
aj3 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explanation and comparison between platforms: https://mobile.twitter.com/mcclure111/status/142590242262759...

Thanks, that’s a great investigation! So broken hinting it is. Embarrassing that they didn’t pick it up in testing.

Probably a case of a monoculture of designers and/or developers on Retina Displays and Apple's renderer getting the benefit of extra pixels per inch of the usual font sizes?

This seems really common with tech companies that the fonts they like for "crisp" and "light" look great on Retina Displays and no one thinks to check any other display or OS font renderer. I feel it's also why the designers at so many companies right now often accidentally favor (display) fonts with hints and weight tuned for headlines, high DPI printing, and/or large uses (banners) for places where body fonts with thicker weights and better hints for smaller font sizes on less pixel dense displays would be much better for everyone involved.

(Though some of that belief that it is such a widespread problem comes from my bias from ugly personal experience of getting designs handed to me from the only macOS users in an entire enterprise and having to point out their font choices were entirely inappropriate on anyone else's displays in the company, and being the only one to point it out and easily ignored because I wasn't a designer and what did I know.)

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

#195

Post by jchw »

dbbk wrote: post #192
jchw wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was one version of macOS where the system UI font was Helvetica and it was horrible.

And iOS, no? I don’t recall that being a huge problem.

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

#196

Post by srfvtgb »

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…

Apple has been doing this for a while and it hasn't had much effect outside devices which run their software: 

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

#197

Post by akersten »

ceejayoz wrote: post #21
userbinator wrote: post #2

This is what user stylesheets were intended to solve. Too bad the majority browsers have gone down the path of attempting to remove all customisation.

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…

> Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's web inspector, for example. The "Sponsored" tag is made up of 31 different randomly named span tags. https://imgur.com/a/AHZL8ko

Tangential, but I love the image of a frustrated PM at Facebook hearing the news that "hey, you still have to make this label readable to screenreaders," necessitating an `aria-label` with the plain-text content "Sponsored", which makes all their span-chopping junk completely irrelevant to adblocker rules that can now just look for that string as an anchor :)

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

#198

Post by Alex3917 »

adamrezich wrote: post #7

is 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?

> is it actually objective qualities of the font that are giving people headaches

The typeface pulls your left and right eyes toward each other, making you look at it cross eyed. It's incredibly nauseating, like the feeling you have right after stepping off a poorly-designed amusement park ride.

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