Window to the World, calling for Wind of Wisdom, as common sense is a gift to each soul, as common environment is the inseparable planet, as common desire is to live in a better world.
Blue Bird, lucky birds, continue to cheerfully chirp, twitter, sing among trees and flowers though lost duel with “X”: one from nature, the other from where?
Early Monday morning, Twitter began replacing its blue bird logo with a fan-made “𝕏” logo. The same X also appears on Twitter’s homepage, as a profile picture for its official @twitter account, and on a splash screen displayed while the website loads. The blue bird logo hasn’t been expunged from the service entirely — it still serves as the website’s favicon and remains prominent throughout the mobile apps — but we’re now knee-deep in a haphazard rebranding that was announced by Elon Musk yesterday. “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote.
The modern Twitter bird was actually the company’s second logo and replaced the company’s earlier “Larry the Bird” logo it used between 2010 and 2012. The Twitter bird logo was designed by Martin Grasser alongside Todd Waterbury and Angy Che. The final design was one of 24 potential options presented to Jack Dorsey. Grasser previously told Fast Company that Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO picked it out almost immediately.
The logo itself was constructed from 15 overlaid circles, which Grasser has said helps with its legibility. “With a logo, something that small, you want repetitive shapes and forms,” Grasser told Fast Company. “It makes it easier for the human eye to understand, and it’s less cluttered.” The circles were also meant to symbolize Twitter’s aim of democratizing information and giving everyone a voice.
The Twitter bird was more than just a logo; it also dovetailed with the language used to describe the service. Calling posts “tweets” predated the first version of the bird logo by a couple of years, but now, the two seem fairly inseparable. Twitter is “the bird app,” and posts are “tweets” that you write by tapping a feather icon.
The new X logo, meanwhile, is… whatever. Musk has called it an “interim X logo,” which he suggests will be refined over time. It appears to have been picked from a design submitted by Sawyer Merritt, who says he based his submission on a font found online. It’s so generic that it appears almost identical to the Unicode character “Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X,” aka U+1D54F, aka “𝕏,” which is how Musk has been able to tweet the logo in an entirely text-based tweet. A neat trick for sure — but a damning indictment of how generic Twitter’s interim logo is.
Grasser is said to have drawn at least a thousand birds before achieving the proportions and simplicity he wanted. He sent Jack Dorsey 24 sketches, and Dorsey chose the winner (numbered ‘5CS’, apparently) without a moment’s hesitation. The Twitter logo design does not represent any specific bird, but Grasser has said it was inspired by a hummingbird beating its wings.
The shape is much more circular than a real bird – in fact, the design was formed by 15 circles superimposed in layers on top of each other, creating perfect curves in the beak, head, wings and chest. The bird is looking upwards, to represent hope, freedom and development, while the circles used to create it are said to represent connecting people and ideas.
