The Today Show Announced The Re-re-re-?-design

Short Facebookification Video

Yeah, It’s A Good Question

Why does Twitter want to look like Facebook?

I guess the bottom line is that a public company is going to kowtow to investor and advertiser whims as the need to chase numbers increases. However, I wonder if the change in identity will do more harm than good in the long run. I guess we’ll see how the facebookification of Twitter works out for them.

The Lowdown

I’m not sure how I personally feel about the new design yet but I’m glad that the timeline continues to be a single file reverse chronological layout. However, I don’t like the way the font size jumps from the normal 16px font-size to a whopping 28px font-size for some tweets (apparently ones that get more engagement). Sure, it’s still readable but it impacts the ease of skimmability. It slows down reading and consumption of content IMO.

Also, the new enlarged header / cover image is not going to be the easiest thing for regular users to deal with. Marketers though will love the new real estate that it brings. The rest will be trying to figure out what exactly to do with these dimensions – especially as that cover photo undergoes some auto-resizing depending upon screen size.

In fact, forget about achieving a pixel pefect design. It’s really not going to be pausible for us creatives who enjoyed blending the Avatar with the Header image to achieve a unified one image look. The new 200x200px (400×400 upload) avatar whose position shifts depending on screen size will remove that ability.

Update: One nice feature about the new design is that the white bio text is moved off of the Header image and over to the left side. The white text was not the easiest to design for so that it was still readable (although Tweetbot’s blurred background is a nice solution).

So, it’s time to begin planning your Twitter redesign efforts. New users will get the change immediately it appears but legacy users have a little time to prepare. It will roll out to everyone within the next few weeks as usual.

Add a Twitter redesign line-item to your budget now though.

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