Over the next few weeks your Facebook profile is going to undergo a subtle but important design change. That change comes in the form of a brand-new Friend Request logo.
The design change will feature a new logo of a woman placed equally alongside a man.
Before it showed a man standing in the foreground with the woman slightly behind. That wasn't the first thing that the designer noticed however, it was the chip on the woman's shoulder.
Writing on Medium, Facebook designer Caitlin Winner explains what it was that first alerted her to the unequal nature of the logo.
"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."
"After a little sleuthing I determined that the chip was positioned exactly where the man icon would be placed in front of her, as in the ‘friends’ icon, above."
She goes on to say: "I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me."
Well Caitlin set to work on fixing the chip, and in turn then changing two of Facebook's most iconic logos the Friend Request Logo and the Group logo.
After many months working on the logo, she saved the new icons within the glyph kit and waited.
"Timidly, I saved out a new version of the glyph file, not sure if I was breaking any rules and half expecting a bunch of angry designers to message me asking why I was messing up Facebook’s glyph kit."
"Instead, and somewhat magically, the new icons began to appear in new products across the company and our many platforms."
As Caitlin rightly points out, 'symbols matter', and no matter how small they might be, in the long-term they can make a big difference.