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

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

#221

Post by jayesh-bhoot »

thristian wrote: post #217
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…

Firefox's "Don't allow websites to use custom fonts" option makes the Web feel much more cohesive and polished.

I will plug my Firefox addon here which builds on this Firefox’s feature. Basically the add-on remembers the websites for which the user wants to enforce/unenforce browser fonts.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enforce-brows...

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

#222

Post by jayesh-bhoot »

Arnavion wrote: post #218
thristian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's "Don't allow websites to use custom fonts" option makes the Web feel much more cohesive and polished.

What does that do for fontawesome-style fonts (icons in the private area) that websites love to use instead of SVGs and text labels? I personally block fonts via uBlock Origin, which lets me allow them for the subset of websites I visit regularly enough that I'm okay with allowing fontawesome-style fonts.

would this help? (disclaimer: i wrote the addon)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28165179

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

#223

Post by jayesh-bhoot »

Tangentially related:

If you use Firefox’s feature that allows one to turn off website fonts, I wrote an addon which builds on this feature.

Firefox’s stock feature is all-or-nothing. The add-on remembers the websites for which the user wants to enforce/unenforce browser fonts.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enforce-brows...

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

#224

Post by emodendroket »

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.

I don't like the way they've made everything white but I think the font is fine and even makes the site look fresh.

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

#225

Post by hellbannedguy »

I don't know about Twitter's new font.

I can offer this; 99.99% of the time I hate font changes, especially from companies that I am used to looking at.

I'm not one of those hate any changes guys. I will admit if it works, don't touch it though. A lot of websites don't just work. HN just works. No need to change anything. It font change that irritates me.

Viacom/Comcast recently changed their font on their lousy viewing guide, and it's irritating.

Why? I think it a combination of, "you shouid get working on your lousy app, and not the font?"

Changing font is easy. Changing an api is better especially when it's needed, along with lowering price from customers who hate your company?

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

#226

Post by phreack »

dgan wrote: post #91
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.)

Personally i wouldn't be able to tell they re different without a hint Not sure what the fuss is about

Apparently some font renderers are bugging out on this new font making some letters render in a way that looks misaligned, which is very taxing on the eyes.

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

#227

Post by aaronbrethorst »

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…

Design team needs to earn their keep.

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

#228

Post by dkbrk »

Maybe I'm being a curmudgeon, but I miss bitmapped fonts.

I use terminus wherever I can. It's exactly 12 pixels high (there are larger sizes, but they're not really useful). It's crisp, and clear, and easy to read, and looks excellent in Emacs.

There's no fancy font hinting or subpixel rendering. The font specifies exactly the pixels that it occupies, and that's it. If Emacs tries to render it at 11 or 13 pixels high, it doesn't -- it renders at exactly 12.

Some years back, firefox removed support for bitmapped fonts. So I had to set it to use terminus-ttf instead. This works fine in many places; the comments here in hacker news are being rendered at 12px so it looks pretty similar to the bitmapped font except with the addition of some subpixel rendering. It makes the edges of the letters soft and fuzzy but I would really prefer nice crisp, clean pixels. It's not too bad, though.

But in this comment box, firefox wants to render the text at 13.33px high, so it tries to upscale it a little bit and it looks muddy and terrible.

I guess things are different on a high-DPI display, but if you want to optimize the legibility of characters while minimizing their size, you really can't beat a bitmapped font where someone actually went and manually placed each and every pixel by hand.

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

#229

Post by hiptobecubic »

The way marketing teams talk about asinine changes like this as if they are making deep, meaningful improvements to everyone's lives is just nauseating. It's a fucking font and no one was asking for it.

There are a million ways twitter UX could improve and this is almost the stupidest one I can think of.

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

#230

Post by tompazourek »

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…

For me, it was the opposite with Stack Overflow. I use the Consolas font literally everywhere throughout my Windows machine. It's the default and most common monospace font on Windows, and I'm used to reading code like that. Yet Stack Overflow started using Cascadia Code instead, which I'm not used to, and it feels like all the code there is bold, and some letters have strange proportions.

Maybe website owners could just use "monospace" in CSS and let users configure the browsers as they wish. But I guess it's too late for that now as users aren't used to do this.

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