Show HN: Discreet Twitter buttons

Interesting; I think a couple of those may break their logo user guidelines.

While they are fun, I have a feeling that engagement or clickthru of the element they uncover may be higher without the layer of complexity on top of them.

My problem with such buttons is actually something slightly different: I often notice that on webpages that it looks like the page is interesting and I want to follow similar work, but I don't know how much noise is on the person's twitter account (as opposed to the person's projects). ...I would like to see the most recent tweets show up when I hover over the button.

Although I wouldn't put these on a consumer site, I might throw it on the personal one. These are absolutely beautiful. Great work tholman.

They look really slick, but I have to say I'm not a big fan of things that jump around when my cursor happens to move over them.

Interesting, but it seems to show up as a Unicode missing character of E000 rather than whatever it intended to show up as.

Awesome work.

Would this be against the new TOS for Twitter where you aren't supposed to modify the bird?

Very simple. Very smooth animations. I like.

Wow those are beautiful. Nice work!

This is a cool effect, but I wonder if it wouldn't be more effective if instead the reveal had the logo come in after the onhover.

What I mean is that the link is plaintext, something like "Follow me at @username", which most people recognize as a call to action and a link to Twitter. Upon hover, the Twitter blue is applied with some animation, maybe something like the logo flying in. (yes, I know that screams against most people's personal design aesthetic here, but maybe it will work for some designers who want to stand out and are clever about it).

The main difference is that the Twitter logo is too discrete. There is literally no call to action and there's nothing about the Twitter logo that leads me to think that hovering over it will reveal the call to action. It's more likely to make me think: "This person works at Twitter!"

* edit: on reflection, I do realize that those Twitter icons, especially when used in conjunction with other social icons, are recognized as the "These are the social accounts", especially when they are in the footer. But I guess you'd have to do something different for the other social buttons?

If it's just one Twitter logo and no other social-button context, I still think that the call-to-action is too subtle.