Twitter changed its primary web font for user profiles on Friday, moving to a sleeker and narrower look.
The new font is Gotham Narrow SSm. Gotham tends to be a popular font across the Internet and was used in Barack Obama's campaign. The new logo for One World Trade Center also uses a Gotham variant.
[seealso slug="free-font-creation-tools"]
The font is the product of Hoefler & Co. (neè Hoefler & Frere-Jones), a type foundry operating out of New York City. The font change appears across the Twitter.com site, on user profiles and sidebars, and on tweets and individual tweet pages. Even small things like the tweet embed code (though not the embedded tweets themselves) are set in Gotham Narrow.
(On Friday evening, the main tweet stream on the Twitter.com homepage appeared to switch back and forth between the old and new fonts, but it seemed likely that Twitter was planning on rolling out the new font everywhere on the site.)
Twitter's mobile web interface on smartphones and tablets continues to use Helvetica Neue, Arial or the system default sans-serif font.
This is what the new font looks like on a tweet page:
This is what the tweet page looked like with the old typeface:
The shift follows the new Twitter profiles that first rolled out publicly in February and have only recently been incorporated into most user pages.
The company has made no formal announcement on its blog, but it did share news of the change from the @Support account, as seen above.
Users took notice of the change right away, and predictably, not all are keen on the change.
the twitter font just changed and i am not comfortable with that pic.twitter.com/BkMuIJGYmQ
— Elsie (@ElsieLinley) May 30, 2014
Twitter, stop changing the font for the tweets. It's getting thinner and thinner and harder to read.
— Erik Scott (@MadAdam_) May 30, 2014
Why did my font just completely change, @twitter ... ughhh.
— Jeremy Pond (@JeremyPond) May 30, 2014
We hardly Helvetica Neue you.— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) May 30, 2014
You know who hates Twitter's new font of Gotham the most? The Joker. OH MY GOD I AM SO SORRY FOR THIS JOKE.— Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) May 30, 2014