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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.
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“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.”
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird
This logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three. @toddwaterbury, @angyche and myself,
The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase "e", a 🧵 pic.twitter.com/pogZnorRko
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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 Jack wanted something simpler pic.twitter.com/ruR52lZtLL
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
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.
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I was also trying to capture the motion of birds, and the shape that profile created led us to play with that round belly in the 3rd and 4th sketches pic.twitter.com/8ZEAU17Sx4
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
We liked using a circles to construct our drawings, it felt like the bird should have an underlying neutrality and simplicity about it pic.twitter.com/ir1apIsVf5
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
From that point on we really spent our time perfecting every little detail... so that it felt balanced, and visible as a bird at the smallest of sizes. pic.twitter.com/fkueKzmST7
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
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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