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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

#201

Post by egypturnash »

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...

https://mobile.twitter.com/mcclure111/status/142554526675777... is the tweet with a screen grab of the very fucked-up way it renders on Android, in case Twitter decides to hide that part of the thread for you like it does for me. It’s really astoundingly nasty-looking.

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

#204

Post by filchermcurr »

Huh. I looked at a side by side comparison and I could barely tell the difference. And everything on twitter.com seems legible. I guess I'm not typeface sophisticated enough!

Now the PayPal and Dropbox fonts... those I noticed. And those I loathe entirely.

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

#205

Post by molofaha »

Narretz wrote: post #115
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.)

I don't know if it's the quality of the screenshot, but the left image (old) looks way more blurry to me then the new one.

It's the screenshot. The left screenshot appears to have been resized so it's markedly more blurry than it should be.

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

#206

Post by andrewingram »

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

Ironically making it not even that unique amongst "social networks", since Depop adopted GT America as their brand typeface back in 2017. Whilst Depop is technically a shopping app, it's one with a heavy skew towards social networking functionality.

Though to be fair, Depop uses GT America Extended and Expanded, rather than Standard.

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

#208

Post by helipad »

tehbeard wrote: post #164
helipad wrote: post #162

Since most of the comments are negative, I will say I noticed the new font yesterday and loved it on my Windows computer in Chrome. I switch between Mac for work and Windows for pleasure and Windows font rendering can be hit and miss. I notice fonts on websites a lot and get frustrated when they're bad but this was one of the most pleasant ones I've experienced, to the point I went and looked it up. I didn't realize…

Can I ask for your resolution + monitor size? I'm on Windows, and in Chrome and Firefox this new font is a pain to read. ( 1080p / 24" here )

13" Surface Laptop 3.

2256x1504 (recommended) at 150% scale (recommended)

On Windows 11 too, if that has any consequence.

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

#209

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

To complement srfvtgb's point, even official unicode characters are not guaranteed to be included in all fonts. Having the glyph disappear on other platforms will probably be accepted as a fact of life, especially as it's a corporate logo.

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

#210

Post by makeitdouble »

Analemma_ wrote: post #67
mbesto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget when this has been discussed before but a lot of major digital companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) end up creating their own fonts for legitimate business reasons that are totally unrelated to design/usability. I can't seem to find the reference, but I think it had to do with licensing/commercial reasons.

A lot of font foundries switched from one-time lump-sum payments to pay-per-use, thinking they’d make a whole bunch of money from the scale of big digital companies, and not realizing this would just cause these companies to design their own fonts instead. Really short-sighted IMO.

From your description it looks to me like the foundry industry moved from one-time lump-sum for everyone, to one-time lump-sum (font designing cost) for some rich companies, and pay-per-use for everyone else.

Was it effectively a bad move ?

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