Facebook Has Updated Its Friends Icon Design, Too

The first day of this month brought with it a refreshed Facebook logo, one that differed just enough from the original that most users could stare at it for a while and wonder if something was different. The change, it seems, was to make the logo a little more modern, a little more relevant, while retaining its defining characteristics. That wasn't the end of the social network's design tinkering, however, and one of its designer's recently detailed how the friends icon was tweaked in recent months.

The new icon was shown off in a post on Medium today, with Facebook's Caitlin Winner detailing how the change was made. It all started with the vector for the female character in the friends icon — the shoulder that is hidden behind the man in the icon was never finished (because it wasn't visible), and had a literal chip in its shoulder.

Winner fixed that, and then made bunch of different designs with different hair, eventually settling on one. That updated design, though, made the male in the icon "seem stiff and outdated", so she updated it with a new hair style and a subtle change to the shoulders.

Then to go one step further, she made a third character with a more ambiguous gender. How Facebook introduced the updated design is simple: she saved them, and others in the company liked them and started updating the icons with the new glyphs. You've likely had the new designs for a few months now without noticing.

SOURCE: TNW