Social media platform Facebook is in the process of making sure the company is as inclusive as possible, so over the past few days, one of Facebook’s design managers, Caitlin Winner, recreated the Facebook friends logo to further empower women.
When she first started at Facebook Winner was dismayed to find two illustrations on file that were supposed to represent a man and a woman – a man with a spiked hairdo and a woman with an apparent “chip on her shoulder”.
“I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me,” she wrote.
So she changed it in the system. Placing the woman in front instead of the man and freshening up both their hairdos – defiantly removing the “Darth Vader-like” hairstyle for the woman.
It turns out the icon was accepted without much fanfare, according to Winner, with engineers dropping in the new logo and updating areas of Facebook.
The logo is currently being rolled out around the platform. Also in the land of Facebook logos, the social media giant refreshed its corporate logo, most notably changing the ‘a’ from a double-storey one to a single-storey ‘a’.
The Friends logo update comes as the social media behemoth is attempting to up the ante of its diversity.
In a blog post in early June, Facebook global director of diversity, Maxine Williams, stated how diversity was central to Facebook’s mission.
“It’s vital for us to have a broad range of perspectives, including people of different genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, characteristics and points of view,” wrote Williams. “Having a diverse workforce is not only the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do for our business.”
