Twitter doing away with egg avatar in favor of faceless head
Twitter hasn’t received much recent love for its egg avatar, the one assigned if you don’t upload a profile picture. That’s why a blog by the company today (March 31) said that Twitter will be “rethinking” its default profile pic.
The new Twitter avatar replaces the egg
The blog, by Twitter Design, said that the egg had been a playful way to reference how “eggs hatch into birds that send all the Tweets you see on Twitter!” Now, continued the blog, it is time for something new from the company that “encourages people to upload their own photos for more personal expression.
It gave three reasons for the change to a generic, faceless gray head and shoulders. One was that Twitter refreshed its brand with a new look and feel highlighting diversity and expressiveness of people around the world, and a change to the egg would “prompt more self-expression.”
The second was that the new faceless gray head is less cute than an egg, which would encourage people to upload images that express themselves. The third point said: “We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.”
Some of those egg accounts have been linked to fake news, and with the company trying to root out and ban accounts that advocate violence, a change seemed inevitable.
Twitter said it went through many iterations of the faceless head to make sure it displayed traits that were generic, universal, serious, unbranded, temporary and inclusive.
This is the second change the company has announced in the last few days, including increasing its character limit by not counting user names.
With the new default profile, Twitter hopes people are encouraged to express themselves. They also encourage feedback on the design at @design.