Being a woman herself and having studied in a women’s college, Facebook’s design manager Caitlin Winner couldn’t help but read into the symbolism in the social media site’s current ‘friends’ icon.
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“The woman was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in,” wrote Winner in Medium .
She was inspired by a poster in office that said: Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem. So Winner decided to do something about it.
Her first idea was to draw two silhouettes of equal sizes without a line indicating who was in front. But dozens of iterations later, she decided against the approach.
The reason? She failed to make an icon that didn’t look “like a two-headed mythical beast.”
“So I placed the lady, slightly smaller, in front of the man,” she added.
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She also wanted to rid the woman of the “Darth Vader-like helmet”, so she tried several hairstyles.
” Ponytails felt modern, if a little youthful, but at 32 pixels the pony resembled a small rodent more than a hairdo,” said Winner.
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So Darth Vader’s legacy lived on.
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