Twitter Logo Designer Says Goodbye To 'Great Blue Bird'

Ben Blanchet
Updated ·3 min read
2

A designer of Twitter’s iconic logo on Sunday said goodbye to the “great blue bird” after owner Elon Musk announced he’s junking the symbol in favor of an “X.”

Martin Grasser, a Bay Area-based artist and designer, reflected on the logo as Musk unveiled changes to the look and name of the social media platform.

“Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird,” wrote Grasser, who said he was part of the design team that included Target chief creative officer Todd Waterbury and artist Angy Che.

“The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase ‘e,’” he wrote. “There was essentially no brief, other than we want a new bird, and it should be as good as the Apple and Nike logo.”

Twitter “had made some sort of flying goose,” he said, but co-founder Jack Dorsey “wanted something simpler.”

Grasser, who worked at a creative studio called West at the time, graduated from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design three years earlier.

The artist, in a Twitter thread on Sunday, uploaded several pictures of bird drawings from the creative process.

Grasser and his team “drew thousands of birds to get the right shape,” Fast Company reported in 2019, while the artist played bird sounds of the Amazon rainforest.

“Drawing is one of the quickest ways to understand how the shapes can work together,” Grasser wrote on Sunday.

Grasser closed his thread with a salute to the logo.

“This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years” since it launched in May 2012, he wrote.

The artist told Fast Company that Dorsey picked out one of two dozen bird designs he was shown.

“If I put them on a page, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference. But Jack in two seconds pointed out bird 5CS,” he said.

The new X logo is now live.

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