YOU WON’T HAVE noticed them, but there’s been a few changes made to some parts of Facebook. Some are stylistic, others are more for convenience, but here they are anyway.
The logo change
If you arrived on Facebook’s home page (before logging in), you might have noticed something a little different with its logo. While the traditional ‘F’ logo remains the same, the full name logo uses a different wordmark, having changed at the start of this month.
“We set out to modernise the logo to make it feel more friendly and approachable,” said Facebook’s creative director Josh Higgins to Brand New. “We worked with Eric Olson – whose typeface Klavika was used in the original logo – and developed a custom typeface to reflect where we are now and where we are headed.”
So there you go.
The new friends and groups icon
This change may not have arrived yet but it will soon. When you look at the new friends logo at the top right-hand corner, you will see that both the male and female silhouettes are now the same size, instead of the female version made smaller.
Caitlin Winner, the design manager at Facebook, goes into detail about the redesign of both silhouettes and eventually the friends logo. It started after she noticed a chip in the female silhouette’s shoulder but before long, she goes through the various iterations before she settled on the final design.
The same principle was applied to the groups logo as both it and the friends icon relegated the female icon to the back.
[After redesigning the female silhouette] I was moved to do something about the size and order of the female silhouette in the ‘friends icon’. As a woman, educated at a women’s college, it was hard not to read into the symbolism of the current icon; the woman was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in.
Google Maps is back (kinda)
With particular emphasis on the kinda part as the latest update to Google Maps for iOS now includes sharing a place through Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Nothing major but a nice option should you require it (and if you’re not fond of using Bing Maps).
Minimising videos
You know how on YouTube’s iOS or Android app, you can minimise a video that’s playing so you can go through menus without missing out? The same principle has been brought over to Facebook’s desktop site where you can minimise a video and place it anywhere on the desktop.
It only stays minimised on the page you’re on so if you click on something else, you’ll lose it.
What a time to be alive, eh?
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