Twitter got a redesign today! Everyone’s favorite platform for personal branding, performative weirdness, and watching the American political discourse crumble in real time has undergone a few nips and tucks. Wired writer David Pierce encapsulates the changes well:
Every solid gray icon is now a lighter outline drawing. Headers now appear in bold, to help you navigate more easily. The home icon is still a birdhouse, but it lost the perch—you’ll see just one hole instead of two. A little less bird-y, perhaps? Round avatars help distinguish users from tweets. Retweet and Like counters update in real time, letting you watch tweets go viral. And the reply button gave way to a speech bubble that Twitter hopes is clearer in its purpose.
In short: fewer birds, and many rounded corners. The idea, Pierce writes, is to scale back Twitter’s branding so as to make the platform’s personalities and ever-scrolling “content” much more prominent and easy to engage with. Unfortunately, everyone that uses Twitter also hates Twitter, both as a company and as a thing they regularly engage with, and so this change provided a reason to shit on that company and its unwillingness to more strictly police the awful the platform itself propagates. New York collects some good ones, mostly about Nazis and Twitter’s roving bands of anime-loving misogynists:
twitter users: you should round up these Nazis
twitter: ok, here you go pic.twitter.com/aLFnENTmSC— MC@kawakami’s lap (@commiesona) June 15, 2017
Some people were a little more reflective with their disdain for the new iconography.
The graphical update is, in the end, just something new to hate on Twitter, which is what the platform is best at fostering anyway. There’s something sort of beautiful about everyone stopping what they’re doing, at least momentarily, in order to shit on the company itself rather than each other. In that case, maybe let’s mark the redesign a success?