Education & Society, Tech, Web & Social

Another Change: Facebook Changes Friends Icon for Gender Equality

Adarsh Verma
July 8, 2015

Did you notice how Facebook did a logo makeover last week? Well, this change was so subtle that people didn’t even notice. While logo change was driven by design and generic approach, today in another refined change, Facebook changed the friends and groups icon.

Facebook’s design manager Caitlin Winner wrote in a Medium post how she changed the Facebook’s iconic “friends” icon. She writes that the man symbol was symmetrical with a spiked hairdo and round shoulders, but the lady had a chip in the shoulder to accommodate the front-placed man in the “friends” icon. So, she thought, obviously without any ill intentions, to change it.

Caitlin writes that this set her on an icon design quest that resulted in change of the female shoulders as well as the Darth Vader-like helmet look of the lady haircut and some changes in male icon too. The new male icon too got its shoulders and hair fixed.

After the design, there came the most important question: the placement! In the old icon, the man icon stood ahead of the woman, who was lurking in his shadow and her size was scaled down to a distance behind him. Caitlin expresses herself:

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.

So decided to place both man and woman equally in the icon with woman getting the front position, but slightly smaller than the man. She describes:

Dozens of iterations later, I abandoned this approach after failing to make an icon that didn’t look like a two-headed mythical beast. I placed the lady, slightly smaller, in front of the man.

Apart from this change in “friends” icon, changes were made in the “groups” icon too. This new icon again witnessed woman getting placed in front of the man.

These changes may seem very small to many of you, but they refer to the increasing awareness regarding gender issues at Facebook. Tell your thoughts about this design change in “friends” icon by Facebook?

Via: Medium

Also read: At WWDC, Apple Makes Effort to Improve Women Participation in Male-dominated Tech World

Adarsh Verma

Fossbytes co-founder and an aspiring entrepreneur who keeps a close eye on open source, tech giants, and security. Get in touch with him by sending an email — [email protected]