Have you noticed a small change in your “Friends” icon on Facebook? Caitlin Winner, a design director at Facebook, has a post explaining why the icon changed.
Essentially, the small photograph presents two faceless figures of a man and a woman.
As you will notice in the image below, while the male figure had rounded shoulders, the female figure had a strange indentation in the shoulder on the left side, and of course the male figure was placed in front of her. In the old icon, the female figure appears smaller than the male.
"I assumed that while there was no ill intent, something was off about me," Caitlin Winner said.
So she set out to redesign Facebook's icons. So in the new icon we see more solid shoulders on the female figure, a different haircut, and of course the fact that the woman is in front of the man.
As a woman who studied at a women's college, it was not difficult to read the symbolism of the old icon, the woman was literally in the shadow of the man.
Caitlin Winner has taken it upon herself to examine the symbolism of all the images used by the popular social network.
She tries to question each icon, and especially those that are most familiar to us, according to TNW.
For example, is a briefcase the best symbol for “work”? Which population carries briefcases and in what era? What other ways are there to symbolize “work.” And which of them will be able to bring the word “work” to mind for the majority of people on Earth?
So that you don't think there is anything random in the design of a page (and not only).
