Yesterday, Twitter unveiled a sweeping redesign of its platform’s aesthetics, content policies, and overall commitment to fostering a more healthy, reliable online ecosystem. Oh, and they finally rolled out an “Edit” button feature for tweets, which is gonna make things a lot easier for users across the board...hahahaha. Ha. Ha. Just kidding. There’s just a new font now with the inane moniker “Chirp.” It looks a lot like Arial.
Oh, right—buttons are in high contrast now, and text auto-aligns left, too.
“While it might feel weird at first, these updates make us more accessible, unique, and focused on you and what you’re talking about,” Twitter posted via its Design account. Chirp was actually first announced back in January via a lengthy Twitter thread from the company’s creative director of global branding, but only got the official rollout earlier this week. “Our key objective with this brand refresh is to improve how we convey emotion and imperfection,” they wrote at the time, which... is certainly one way to describe what’s generally being conveyed via the hell app.
People are predictably not happy with the new changes and/or Twitter’s continuing failure to address its actual, major problems. More pointedly, however, some are complaining of Chirp’s apparent problems for users with visual and cognitive difficulties.
Others dealing with dyslexia and related problems have offered that Chirp is at least somewhat of an improvement from Twitter’s past reliance on serif fonts. Really, the easiest solution here is to allow for multiple typeface options, or at the very least, a toggle choice for Chirp.
Twitter promises more design updates are on the way, so be prepared for additional, minor improvements and/or disappointments to come. Speaking of which, has anyone asked what Cormac McCarthy thinks about all this? Could be worth looking into.
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