Facebook Sans

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.

Facebook

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.

Twitter

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. 

Google

Phucking Phacebook

An Open Letter

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:

I saw that you got married this weekend. Congratulations and all that. I read that you had one of those “surprise” weddings where the guests think they are attending something completely different — in your case, your girlfriend’s graduation — and find out that they are really attending your wedding once they are safely behind the security fence in order to stay gossiping tongues. Whatev. Your guests probably all said “oh my goodness, what a surprise!” and all that, but what they were really thinking was “that fucker doesn’t trust me? What the fuck. Glad I didn’t buy him a wedding gift.” Not that you need wedding gifts.

What you do need, however, is a sense of occasion. I know you’re all about the comfort and the low-profile etc., but a business suit, skinny tie and cheapo accessories? For your wedding? Dude: your bride went to the trouble of wearing  a dress. A white dress (ahem). The least you could do for the pictures if nothing else, was cast your personal aversion to style aside for one lousy afternoon and don a tuxedo. No wonder Priscilla looks so…grin-and-bear-it in your wedding photos, rather than big-ole-grin. But like I say, good luck with that.

Actually I’m writing because of the way you chose to tell the world your news: via facebook. It’s a lifestyle network, in case you haven’t heard of it. OK, I just made up the definition “lifestyle network,” because that’s what it’s become: facebook fucking rules your whole life. Don’t believe me? You ought to check it out sometime. (My mother once gave me great advice: she said “don’t be facetious unless you can spell it.” F-A-C-E-T-I-O-U-S. Thanks Mom).  

I’m not even using a capital F for facebook because A) if’s so damn ubiquitous it’s moved into the realm of lower-case; and B) you don’t capitalize it yourself. But here’s the thing: doing the cute change-relationship-status-at-the-same-time thing probably worked for you because you’re like, the inventor of facebook, but it doesn’t work like that for ordinary stiffs like me and my new fiancé.

We got engaged yesterday and wanted to be cute like you, but facebook wouldn’t let us. It only let him change his status to “engaged” while it merely cancelled out my relationship altogether. Nothing I did could make it come back. Panic ensued: instead of the cavalcade of congratulations and “likes” we expected, we feared all of his friends would be puzzled and all of mine upset. What happened was that a long time later, I got a “relationship confirmation request” asking me if I was engaged to my fiancé. Only once I’d responded to that would facebook allow me to re-create, from scratch, my relationship with him. And it took even longer for both of our statuses to reflect that we were both engaged. And it took all freaking day for comments posted by all of our friends to show up. And it wouldn’t let either of us reply to those comments and still won’t.

So, Mr. Zuckerberg, I say bollocks to that. You have, like, a hundred billion dollars, right? Surely you can make facebook work, right?

Or is it that now that it’s gone public, you don’t give a toss?

I’d like it very much if you would consider my plight on your honeymoon. If you even had one. Perhaps you can help assuage the mental anguish your invention cost my fiancé and I by donating the cost of a honeymoon to us. Or, say, a wedding. (He’ll be wearing a tuxedo, even if he has to sell a kidney to rent one).

Regards,

Me