The internet, like any organism, self-regulates while
experimenting chaotically, and thus it lumbers forward. Design paradigms go
from brand new to ubiquity relatively rapidly, and our eyeballs become inured
to a sense of how things ought to look. It’s a right-handed universe, and whole
vistas we take for granted and don’t even register become visual and functional
battlefields when designers make the slightest change.
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Ask anyone what typeface Facebook uses (or Twitter, or
Gmail, for that matter), and you’ll get a lot of dead air. This is good. This
means the typeface is doing its job, which is to disappear from our
consciousness. But the day Facebook (or anyone else) makes a design change —
whoa. The whole world suddenly seems out of whack. Ask someone what the new
typeface Facebook is officially “experimenting” with and they won’t know; but
ask them to describe it, and they might say “blocky,” or “smaller, easy to
read.” How does it differ from what it was the day before? We’ve already
forgotten.
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Facebook has indeed changed their type design; the site is
now aggressively sans serif Helvetica small type, regular weight and bold in
blue. Except for large headlines from shared news posts; they’re old-school
looking, in a deliberately noticeable serif. Does it seems familiar to you? It
should. It’s the same type that Google uses, and the same type Twitter uses.
The internet hangout has become Swiss.
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