Facebook employee Caitlin Winner was offended by a female Facebook icon because it appears to have a chip in its shoulder, so she spent a month redesigning gendered icons on the social media site, she wrote Tuesday on a blog forum.
Winner wrote that she didn’t like a female icon being shadowed by a male icon and the “friend” icon only being represented by a man. So Winner took the initiative to spend a month redesigning icons.
“Much to my dismay, not long into my tenure as a Facebook designer I found something in the company glyph kit worth getting upset about,” Winner wrote on Medium, an interactive blog site.
“There in the middle of the photoshop file were two vectors that represented people. The iconic man was symmetrical except for his spiked hairdo but the lady had a chip in her shoulder,” she said. “I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me.”
Lady with chip on her shoulder.
After discovering the upsetting chip, Winner spent a month redesigning multiple outdated icons.
“The lady icon needed a shoulder, so I drew it in — and so began my many month descent into the rabbit hole of icon design,” she said. “After fixing her shoulder I was tempted to remove the Darth Vader-like helmet and give her hair some definition. Ponytails felt modern, if a little youthful, but at 32 pixels the pony resembled a small rodent more than a hairdo.”
The man icon, although not offensive, also needed updating, but Winner discovered that the “add friend” icon only used a male, therefore “it didn’t seem fair.”
“In updating the man I discovered the many places on Facebook where a single figure is used to represent an action, like in the ‘add friend’ icon,” Winner wrote. “It didn’t seem fair, let alone accurate, that all friend requests should be represented by a man, so I drew a silhouette for cases where a gendered icon was inappropriate.”
Also offensive to Winner, who was educated at all-women’s Wellesley College, was the symbolism that left women icons “in the shadow of the man.”
“Next, I was moved to do something about the size and order of the female silhouette in the ‘friends icon,'” she said. “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.”
Winner’s solution was to place the lady icon in front of the man.
Old icon on the left, new icon on the right.
The “groups” icon also banished the lady icon to the back row of the trio, so Winner redesigned it to feature the woman in front.
As Winner writes, something similar happened last year when a Facebook employee redesigned the globe icon to feature an “Asia-centric” icon.
“It turns out this kind of self initiated project is not unique at Facebook. Last year, designer Julyanne Liang worked with engineer Brian Jew to give the non-American half of the globe an accurate world view from the notification icon,” Winner gleefully reports. “Since then they’ve added an Asia-centric globe, too.”
Winner now polices Facebook for oppressive icons, saying she’s “on high alert,” always questioning icons.
“As a result of this project, I’m on high alert for symbolism. I try to question all icons, especially those that feel the most familiar.”
“For example, is the briefcase the best symbol for ‘work’? Which population carried briefcases and in which era?” she asked. “What are other ways that ‘work’ could be symbolized and what would those icons evoke for the majority of people on Earth?”