PexelsHave you noticed anything different about your Facebook News Feed today?
No? Look harder.
According to a few scattered reports from Twitter users, the social media giant appears to be testing out new fonts across the platform.
Look a little closer at your own account and you may notice a few changes in the shape of your letters.
Whoa, looks like @Facebook just switched over to San Francisco font. I only ever noticed this on @GitHub before. Makes it feel more native ? pic.twitter.com/XUAxHhui2p
— Hans van de Bruggen (@verbiate) March 13, 2017
did facebook's font change or am i just still in daylight savings shock
— roxi barron (@roxwithlox) March 13, 2017
Daylight savings time, #snowmageddon2017 and Facebook font change is all too much to handle -___-
— Waqas Sheikh (@msheikhw) March 14, 2017
But unlike Geneva, the font that Facebook started trying out last year, the new font isn’t Facebook’s own. Instead, it seems the company is now going forward with the idea of having fonts default to users’ system fonts.
So what does that mean? If you’re on a Mac, your fonts might be showing as ‘San Francisco’, and if you’re on a PC, you may be seeing ‘Segoe UI’.
And the change seems to have been in the works for some time now, at least according to a tech thread on Designer News.
If scattered tweets are anything to go by, the switch in fonts is apparently to make the site feel more ‘native’ to the user. By keeping Facebook the same font as the user’s computer, those browsing the site might feel more at ease – or something like that.
