If you’ve been on the web for a while, you may remember the MySpace days. MySpace, preceding Facebook, was a home where you could connect typical social media style with friends, but one of the key factors of MySpace was that your profile was a little home base you could customize to your heart’s desire… To a degree. You could place all kinds of cool code to give your profile a background image, or make it play a song when someone arrived at your profile. Users could concoct really unique experiences from profile to profile.
Places like Facebook, Twitter, and others homogenized the whole experience, and with good reason; really, no one loves to have Green Day blast at them when they open someone’s profile, and then wait five hours for all the moving and flashing animated gifs to load. Plus, all the ability to customize nearly fully meant MySpace profiles could be a vector for delivering malware, spyware, and more. Allowing users a small level of customization rather than a vast all-inclusive customization experience meant it was easier to browse as a whole.
Now, in 2025, we’ve got a whole lot of homogenized social media. It can be difficult to customize your profile or stand out in a crowd of many when almost all profiles look the same, barring the profile picture, header graphic, and actual copy.
Why did we go down this quick trip down memory lane?
Because today I’m going to be talking about “fancy fonts” in use on social media, what they are, and how they affect other users.
Continue reading ““Fancy Fonts” and using unicode characters on social media”
