What has been the face of Twitter trolls and newbies alike for 7 years is now a thing of the past, as Twitter drops the egg as their default profile photo and replaces it with a generic portrait figure, as many other sites use.
In a blog post, Twitter shared a brief history on the design of the image, relating the egg photo given to new users who go on to become regular Twitter users and an egg hatching into a bird. The image, a white egg against a colorful background, was first introduced in 2010 and succeeded 3 other default profile photos.
The microblogging site’s design team also explained their reasoning for the change, including highlighting the company’s commitment to recognizing different groups of users around the world by prompting self-expression among users through their profile photos. Some users also chose to keep the previous egg image because they liked the look of it, so the new default photo is meant to more apparently serve as a placeholder as encouragement to replace it. Twitter also briefly addressed the fact that accounts are often solely made to harass users, so a correlation between anonymous harassment from “egg” users negatively affects new users who have not yet uploaded a profile photo.
Several iterations of the design were considered after key traits were identified. A grey figure was chosen for being generic, universal, and temporary so that users would want to change it. A high color contrast was used to aid visually impaired users in seeing the image. The coloring also serves to give profiles with the default image less prominence than users with unique profile photos.
The figure is reminiscent of the iconography plastered on restroom doors indicating male and female restrooms. To avoid users associating the new avatar with a specific gender, the head, shoulders, and height were altered.
Avatar revisions can be seen from start to finish below:
numeed 