There was something almost poignant in the Twitter thread last week from one of the original designers of the site’s blue bird logo, soon to be extinct. Martin Grasser recalled how, in 2012, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had commissioned him, in terms familiar to creatives everywhere: “There was essentially no brief,” Grasser suggested, “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.”
Grasser went away and started sketching different real birds, watching them in flight, listening to birdsong as he worked. His eventual design, after thousands of iterations, was based on a hovering hummingbird with a truncated beak and puffed-up chest. Grasser’s thread showed how he had superimposed 15 overlapping circles on the logo to give the bird its optimum “friendly” rotundity (the exact opposite of Elon Musk’s unnerving new black X branding, which puts a cross next to just about every feeling of alienation). Grasser’s valedictory thread was a brief masterclass in how graphic design can tap into human emotion. His bird, meanwhile, will inevitably become exhibit A in the various museums of lost logos that can be found in dustier corners of the internet, alongside the blue globe of Pan Am and the torn ticket stub of Blockbuster Video.
