Another Change: Facebook Changes Friends Icon for Gender Equality

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:

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:

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