One of the people behind Twitter’s iconic logo said goodbye to the “great blue bird” on Friday after Elon Musk announced that he plans to do away with the design in favour of an “X.”
Martin Grasser, a Bay Area-based artist and designer, reflected on the logo’s journey since its launch as Musk previewed changes to the look – and name – of the social media platform.
“Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird,” wrote Grasser, who added that he was part of a team that designed the logo along with Target’s 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’... 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 – but [Twitter co-founder] Jack [Dorsey] wanted something simpler.”
Grasser, who worked at a creative studio called West at the time, had graduated from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design three years before the start of the project.
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 as he worked on the project.
“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, writing that “This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years” since it launched in May 2012.
The artist told Fast Company that Dorsey picked out one of two dozen bird designs following months of work on the project.
“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 of the logo presentation.
Musk, in a tweet on Sunday, said the platform’s interim logo would go live “later” that day.
The platform’s website and mobile apps appear to still use the bird logo, as of early Monday morning.