The new web interface for Twitter has been sitting as “beta” for a few months now (as of this writing), and I’m quite sure my visual branding has suffered. If you think that’s not important, and that it’s only the 140 characters that count, please think again. If you have added a pictures with your head shot, or a company logo, or any kind of image to replace the anonymous silhouette, you have branded yourself visually. And that matters.
Here’s a screenshot of my old Twitter page:
Screenshot for @deanmeistr's account under the old Twitter design - 1024 x 768 pixels wide
Although the background was a static image, with no ability to link (either with text or to use mapping), one still could create the illusion of a standard web site with navigation in a left hand column. Twitter’s live content would float in the browser window, with a wide center column of tweets and some navigational features in the right.
What’s happening, indeed!
All of my branding is sucessfully blotted out with the new design, which absorbs so much of the browser’s live area you see something rather distracting rather than my carefully laid out background.
Here’s my page showing the new Twitter design, again at 1024 x 768 pixels. Notice my entire identity work is almost completely lost, as Twitter fills the central content with additional information. Note also that I have no ability to control the CSS they provide; that floating content is set in both in its width and placement, and I cannot put any background image underneath it to compensate for the space they have consumed.
And to be fair, I have tried this in all of the standard browsers, from IE to Safari to Firefox, on both major platforms (Windows and Mac).
Twitter's revised design in the browser for @deanmeistr's account - still at 1024 x 768 pixels wide.
Here’s my friend Tom Guarriello’s (@tomguarriello) Twitter page, in the “new” twitter. Looks fine? You can see his personal information that he put together in the left, again as a “mini branding” area. But look again. This is a screen shot taken with the browser opened up to over 1400 pixels wide, in order to compensate for the contents’ floating requirement center screen. This is not standard to most browsers running on the average desktop monitor.
@tomguarriello's Twitter page - at 1430 x 763 pixels!
Even the iPad and notebook user running Twitter from their browser would more likely see this:
@tomguarreillo on Twitter - at 1024 x 768 pixels
Visual Branding on Twitter? Limited Possibilities.
Twitter’s message on their ABOUT page states:
“Businesses use Twitter to quickly share information with people interested in their products and services, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and influential people. From brand lift [sic], to CRM, to direct sales, Twitter offers businesses a chance to reach an engaged audience.”
Brand lift? I like brand lift. However, I consider visual identity an important part of creating and owning a brand. I want every opportunity possible to identify my brand, and the background on the twitter page was just about the only area permitted. Essentially, visual branding has been deprecated to a single, smaller square image (often not bigger than a favicon, when seen on a mobile device). It’s really too bad that Twitter decided to remove the ability to enrich the visual branding experience by covering the background area (for most browsers), and not offering anywhere else in the foreground to uniquely identify the account holder.
Recently, Facebook changed their default landing page for people to view more pictures of the account holder in a more prominent place, right above the main content stream area. For branding, visuals matter, which is why we spend so much time and money creating visual branding identities. Will Twitter make a revision to the design of their browser page to allow for more visual branding opportunities if it offers them greater financial gain? I hope so. I’m ready for that.
In the meantime, I’ll think about how to squeeze my branding visual into a long, narrow channel about 50 pixels wide, and hope Twitter doesn’t remove that possibility completely in their next revision of the browser page.
