TwitterCopied

On 6 June 2012 Twitter unveiled a new 'Twitterbird' as the trademark symbol for the company, AFP reported via Phys.org. At the time Twitter claimed more than 140 million active users, and the news agency cited a survey finding that one in seven American internet users were on it.

Creative director Doug Bowman announced the change on the Twitter blog. He wrote that over six years the world had become familiar with a little blue bird, constantly associated with both the service and the company, and that from now on a simplified bird would be the universally recognisable symbol of Twitter. The blog put it plainly: Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter. There was no longer any need, he said, for text, bubbled typefaces or a lowercase t to represent the brand.

The construction was the story. Bowman said the bird grew out of a love of ornithology, design within creative constraints and simple geometry, and that it was crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles, likened to the way networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect. A bird in flight was presented as a representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility. Updated guidelines and downloads went up on the brand resources page the same day.

VentureBeat framed it as a funeral. The bird the world knew had a name, Larry, after the Boston Celtics great Larry Bird, and had subtly evolved in shape over six years; the replacement was nameless, took no inspiration from any one person and was meant as a geometric representation of Twitter activity. The new mark replaced all the old icons, including the lowercase t and the twitter wordmark, and the outlet read the change as a sign that the network had become famous enough to need no name at all.

The rationale is heavy with metaphor, but the move itself was disciplined. Killing the wordmark was a confident bet that a symbol could carry a company, a bet very few brands win and Twitter had already earned through sheer ubiquity. Building it from circles gave the bird real rigour, and dropping the text left nothing to fight at small sizes.

Few logos have been so thoroughly owned by a single colour and a single silhouette.