Gwyn D'Mello Facebook "Friends" icon has a new look and you never noticed it
Facebook has a "little" change today. Notice something different about your Friends tab? Does it look like anything has changed? No? Well, it has
The old icon has a male silhouette in front, with a woman's silhouette indented, to show she's behind him. The new one swaps their positions.
The change is largely the work of Caitlyn Winner, a design manager at Facebook. In a blog post on Medium, she says, "Not long into my tenure as a Facebook designer I found something in the company glyph kit worth getting upset about. There in the middle of the photoshop file were two vectors that represented people. The iconic man was symmetrical except for his spiked hairdo but the lady had a chip in her shoulder. After a little sleuthing I determined that the chip was positioned exactly where the man icon would be placed in front of her, as in the ‘friends’ icon, above. I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me."
Caitlyn then proceeded to improve the glyphs, drawing in full shoulders for the woman, modernising hairstyles on both genders and even creating a new group icon, like so.
In both cases, Caitlyn has placed the women in front, while simultaneously making the men in the background a little larger. And ever since, Facebook has started putting these symbols out, with absolutely zero fuss, as she was pleasantly surprised to see.
But while you can see this change on your phone app, the desktop version of Facebook still has the old symbols. And no, that's not a subtle opposition of the feminist movement, and no, Caitlyn is not being over the top, even if not everyone can get behind the new icon. The important point here is that she saw something she wanted to change, and the company accepted it and endorsed it with no fanfare, as easily as they would have a suggestion to fix the office printer. It wasn't a big deal, and that's a big deal.
First Published: Tuesday, July 14, 2015, 16:37