Twitter stops using Helevetica Neue in favour of Gotham | Hacker News Reader

Twitter stops using Helevetica Neue in favour of Gotham

twitter.com

50 pointskenrick9557 comments

I'm getting so frustrated with Twitter, as a shareholder and big believer in the company. I really think they need to be focusing on new services and experiences (actual new functionality!) with the content on their platform.

For example, many of their users are quite passive - why not improve the experience for the logged-out user? Twitter could be a great source of real-time news for everyone - not just heavy users of the platform.

In addition, did you know that if you paste a url into the search you can see the tweets that link to it? There are great conversations happening about published stories - yet that content has no way to get surfaced, really. I should be able to see the twitter conversations that are happening around every piece of content on the web, and I can't! That's crazy.

I get that design is important, but Twitter needs to innovate on its product. Rant over.

We can only assume they've had their entire engineering team fighting for weeks over the decision. There is no way they have a team of engineers focused on development of features, bugs etc and a separate team of designers, marketers or branding specialists who focus on the UI/UX, and other visual decisions like font choice, uh uh, no way I say, I say no way. They are way too small of a company to have dedicated designers.

The logged-out user experience (or even just the web/mobile experience) is really odd. Apart from a bar permanently blocking screen real estate telling you to signup/login, there are times where it simply doesn't work (not down, just not working), translations are mismatched/wrong, things like viewing an image.. simply don't work, and never have for me. It literally gives a black popup with nothing happening and this old iPhone 1.0 feel to it.

For a long time, they didn't even manage to provide an up to date version of someones tweets. Heres a realtime communication website, and yet when logged out, tweets would be at times delayed for hours and days.

The most common thing I struggle with as an accountless user is linking to tweets. It can take me a good while to find a link to a tweet I'm looking at.

The second most common problem I have is finding a user, even if I know their handle. It was hard to believe how difficult that was the first time I tried it (admittedly, vanity URLs have made this easier).

In the Twitter OSX app, if I want to find an account, my method is:

  Search icon
  Paste in handle, "@accountname"
  Receive list of people mentioning @accountname
  Click on one of them to view the account

Pretty insane that it wouldn't just give me that account name first followed by similar account names.

Another classic thing is the autocomplete on account names when writing a tweet. It will show me (and prioritise!) accounts I've never heard of and more often than not the account I'm actually wanting is last in the list.

Most Twitter apps (including the official one) support ⌘-U (command/apple-U), which is "Go to user..." - it autocompletes, though I imagine it's using the same suggestions that you mentioned. Definitely less steps, either way.

Oh boy, that's going to be helpful. Thanks!

As a user with an account, I also struggle with linking to tweets. The process right now is something like this:

1. See tweet in timeline, click the "expand" link in the lower left, or just some other blank spot in the tweet. 2. Hunt around until I see the non-obvious de-emphasized "details" link in light grey next to the date. 3. Click the "details" link and load the full page for the tweet. 4. Copy the link from the browser URL bar.

I don't know why they make it so hard and require me to load a whole other page and interrupt my timeline browsing flow. Annoyingly there's a "more" link on each tweet which I always end up checking anyway, and it doesn't have an option to copy a link to the tweet! You can "share via email" or "embed tweet" but neither of those gives you a useful URL you can just paste somewhere. The UI is a train wreck.

You can just click the date. Not obvious, I know.

you can also click or right click on the hour right next to the tweet which will give you a permalink to the tweet.

Obvious and discoverable. I never even realized the time was a link, and I use the twitter web UI every day.

really good point. There was a discussion on NPR the other day about how un-intuitive Twitter was and how most normal people just don't get even what a retweet is, what a hashtag is, or the whole reply system on Twitter.

For example the fact that if you start a tweet with @ it will not show up on your feed. Stuff like that.

There's also no way to search from the main page. I find myself typing "twitter.com/search" into my URL bar a lot.

do you mean the logged out main page? If it is any consolation you can't search Facebook logged out either.

Yeah, but Facebook kind of has different use cases. Unless you're really trying to do some form of "stalking" (I don't mean this literally), there's not much use for a search feature while logged out.

Twitter on the other hand is very useful to use when you're logged out. Plus Twitter DOES let logged out users search, with the exact same search abilities as any logged in user, but they simply hide the functionality until yo're logged in.

Really? This is probably something a few designers put together who weren't busy on other projects. Companies like Twitter employ a lot of people working on multiple goals simultaneously. As a shareholder you should rest assured that they're not prioritizing font choice above all other business matters.

Sorry, but how does being a random shareholder imply that business is being conducted in the most efficient manner? Just because a company had an IPO doesn't mean it will make the most sensible decisions. I'm not saying Twitter is being irresponsible as I have zero knowledge of their organization internals.

I just meant that I (working in the software industry) know that something like a font choice is a small matter for a company (even though it might be a big deal to a few employees working the project). And I know that if they are re-assigning software engineers to work on choosing fonts and other design matters, employees would be quitting Twitter in large numbers (which hasn't happened).

(Note: I had updated my above comment grammatically to clarify that I'm referring to the original commenter as a shareholder, not myself).

It is easier to target ads at logged-in users, and collect meaningful data to track them.

They'll have a better chance at adding new users if they improve the experience for those not logged in, surely?

I'd prefer that Twitter fix old functionality before changing typeface for the sake of change. Users can't even save a search from an iOS device using the official app or mobile view. Sheesh, search is Twitter's best feature.

I care less about what font is used and more about not having the text displayed at seemingly random sizes from one page to another, or even on the same page. Insanity!

I agree with this. The random size fonts took me a while to understand what it meant until I realized my popular tweets were a bigger font. I like the uniformity of one font size. If they want to indicate which tweets are important then add data showing stats but don't mess with font sizes.

Here is a comparison with Helvetica (not HN) and Gotham with commentary and history:

http://thinkcreateblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/face-off/

Helvetica is ideal for print work, especially headings, as the last few decades' worth of design can attest to. I hate it as a body font on the screen, though. It's too thin at small sizes, which makes it harder to scan text when compared to Lucida Grande, Gotham, etc.

The problem with that article is it's too "inside baseball". It's probably great for font aficionados. But I just want some simple side-by-side images showing how the two fonts differ.

What about us Windows users that have always seen Arial?

With all honesty, Gotham looks very bad when drawn by the ClearType renderer.

what browser are you using? looks great to me on firefox. chrome butchers fonts though.

it's chrome, so you're right.

Everything looks bad with ClearType.

These days it does, but I remember that when ClearType first came out it was mind-blowing. These days it's looking pretty shabby when compared to high density displays.

I'm by no means a typography expert, in fact I don't particularly care about typography all that much. I like the new font, but there's some characters (e.g. "o") that just seem like they have an extra pixel or two on the outer edge. It still looks nice and clean though.

It looks good. But Helvetica was good too. Anyone have any thoughts on why the switch?

Because enormous serif type is trendy right now.

Gotham and Helvetica are both sans-serif.

From their assets site:

> Words don’t just hold meaning; they communicate by their very form. We primarily use the Gotham font family: elegant and direct, stylish but not exclusive. Putting well-designed words in our product enhances the user experience.

Not sure what the 'but not exclusive.' is implying though...

Source: https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets

Still not sure if I agree with it but Lawrence Weiner has a great quote on Helvetica:

"[Helvetica] it’s one of the type faces that I absolutely detest. It’s totally authoritative. It in fact does not adapt itself to things and all information that comes out in Helvetica is saying exactly the same thing: this is cultural, this is intellectual, and this is intelligent. I’m rather afraid that words don’t start off being cultural, intellectual, or intelligent."

Except you know what? I can see Helvetica on my screen. Gotham is literally disappearing into the background.

"Not sure what the 'but not exclusive.' is implying though..."

As in not snobby. Imagine a wealthy and well-dressed business man who still takes the time to help you in the street rather than ignore you because their time is more important than yours.

Helvetica-fatigue. It's everywhere, that and Arial, Open Sans and a hundred other clones.

Gothic is a nice change. It's roomier. More easy going. I like it too.

Only it's not at all.

Does the tracking seem really wide to anyone else? It makes the tweets difficult to read and causes the words to blend together.

EDIT: Oops, posted in the wrong spot, this was meant to be a reply to tvladeck's post.

"In addition, did you know that if you paste a url into the search you can see the tweets that link to it? There are great conversations happening about published stories - yet that content has no way to get surfaced"

I've done this before to view what people are saying about a link or story, but I disagree about "great conversations" taking place. A lot of people simply re-tweet a link or add a few words, but I'd argue that often there is no great insight or "discussion" and most of it is disconnected from other twitter users. (Can you really have a great "conversation" using a 140 character limit?)

I do agree that twitter doesn't use it's content to best effect. There are a lot of users who cluster around shared interests and twitter could aggregate interesting links that are constantly being posted around topics. Other sites like Buzzfeed and Storify editorialise a story by picking tweets that reflect a range of opinions around a story. Is this something that Twitter should do? (I don't know) It would be a shift in focus for them and something not all users would welcome.

Anyway, back to the original story - I'm glad they've dropped Helevtica. It's too over-used and feels like a bland but safe choice for designers. Not sure about Gotham yet. It feels a bit too tall and narrow.

Hilarious. It was totally noticeable today when I visited a user Twitter homepage. I actually thought they started allowing user customizations per page. I thought the MySpace conversion was starting in earnest.

Honestly all of the new design changes at Twitter have been looking awful. I can only assume there is someone new in charge that is messing everything up.

Well, now it seems like they totally screwed up with non-latin characters.

On my non retina mac this doesn't look very good at all. Obviously I need a new laptop to keep up with Twitter.

Reminds me of Comic Sans

Is anybody else bothered by the amount of news this is causing?

What if you're a Lynx user?

... you won't care?

As opposed to if you weren't a Lynx user?

If you are using any terminal-based web browser, then you get whatever font you have set for your terminal.

I have mine set to Times New Roman for maximum banality.

Twitter just went from being an ubiquitous part of our everyday lives to some silly art project.

#wrongmove

Because they changed the font from one well-known and widely used font to another?

You talk as if they're the same.

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