Here's Why Your Twitter Looks Kinda Different

Remember when we said Google made the least-controversial change maybe ever with its recent logo update? Maybe another Internet giant should take note. Twitter just changed its font to Gotham Narrow SSm, and people are not happy. And they're kinda rightly not happy, because the new font is narrow and weird and everything just has to CHANGE online all the time why exactly?

In the minds of us olds — you know, 20- and 30-somethings — there was a golden age when the big sites on the Internet were a more static and familiar place, like a great-aunt's house but with more colorful language, where home pages didn't change for years and menus weren't ever tucked away in hamburgers and everybody used normal fonts like Helvetica. Hel-effing-vetica. What's so wrong with it?

Sure, that world was maybe a world of not-so-hot web design, and cumbersome, overly-cramped, text-heavy sites. But if any site has the right to remain text-heavy it's Twitter, right? The whole 140 characters-make-a-Tweet thing? Communicating via words? Apparently not. Twitter just went narrow with Gotham Narrow SSm. Everything feels out-of-whack and squinty and slight headache-y. And your familiar Helvetica Neue is out the WINDOW. Wasn't it neue enough? Not for Twitter, guys. Not for Twitter.

Wait, is this what it feels like to get old?

Anyway, so this is Gotham Narrow, which its creators, Hoefler & Co., say is "new and economical," and your distaste for it probably makes you, like me, old and wasteful. Here's the rest of the spiel:

As important as the goal of improved space-efficiency was our desire to preserve Gotham's personality, a special challenge in a compact proportion that doesn't allow the pure geometries of Gotham's circles and squares. The result is Gotham Narrow, a font that's compact without feeling squeezed.

You may recognize it — President Obama used the font in his campaign, and a form of Gotham is in One World Trade Center's logo, Mashable reports.

Apparently some people like it.

Image: Hoefler & Co.