Twitter’s Chirp Font
Today, we released a few changes to the way Twitter looks on the web and on your phone. While it might feel weird at first, these updates make us more accessible, unique, and focused on you and what you’re talking about
In the history of the company we’ve either relied on someone else’s typeface, from SF Pro and Roboto, to Helvetica Neue in our brand.
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So, that brings us to “Chirp”, our first ever proprietary typeface.
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Rounded tittles and punctuation introduce a humanist character. The result is a versatile, contemporary family (82 styles across Standard and Display!) with international sensibilities. It accomplishes exactly what we need and it has made itself the hero of our refresh.
Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (via Hacker News):
Almost immediately, users began to complain -- with many saying the new font gave them headaches. (This writer is getting them too.)
mcc:
Like seriously though how do you look at this and not see it in sPoNgEbOb tExT? It’s just bouncing a pixel up and down at random with every letter. I recognize some or this may be some kind of bad interaction with the Android font renderer but: I use Android!
After spending a some time in the official Twitter app today, I think I like Chirp in use. It reminds me of Franklin Gothic — a good version — and, at the weight and size I have set it to, engenders a feeling of precision and clarity that Twitter frankly does not deserve.
Update (2021-08-18): Jeffrey Jose (via Ashley Bischoff):
Twitter’s new font “Chirp” appears to be white-labeled GT America.
Update (2021-08-21): Jeff Johnson:
OMG I just discovered that “Reduce motion” in Accessibility System Preferences disables the Twitter Chirp font.
This also works on iOS!
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
It's odd, to mee it almost looks like some letters - lower-case T for example - are drawn at a slightly smaller scale than most other letters. Really weird choice.
I guess I don’t mind it for branding, but I really dislike it for actually reading in the app, and how terribly I now wish that they’d let us choose between a few fonts in their display settings. It’s got me trying out 3rd-party clients again.