- Elon Musk recently announced Twitter would rebrand as "X," which also included changing the company logo.
- Martin Grasser, Todd Waterbury, and Angy Che designed the beloved blue bird logo in 2012.
Most people, at this point, are familiar with the simple blue bird logo that has become synonymous with Twitter. On Saturday, Elon Musk announced plans to rebrand Twitter as "X," and with that, he has also changed the site's logo to a black and white "X."
The new logo has already replaced the iconic blue bird on the website.
While many users mocked the rebrand, others are mourning the beloved blue bird icon they've grown to know and love since 2012. On Sunday, 46-year-old designer Martin Grasser — who helped create the logo, along with creative director Todd Waterbury and fellow designer Angy Che — penned a thread eulogizing it and explaining its origins.
—martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
On Tuesday, Grasser, who's also the co-founder of the brand studio Studio Mococo, told Insider that he is a little sad to see the design go but ultimately proud of his creation's impact.
In 2012, Grasser said he, Waterbury, and Che started by drawing birds with a pencil and paper until they stumbled on a round form in the belly of the bird, which made it look as if it was soaring. Grasser said they were drawn to the shape because of how simple it was.
"We liked this idea that it didn't belong to one artist's hand, but more to a system or a way of showing overlapping circles and connections," he said. He added that he thinks the roundness of the design signaled optimism, which helped endear it to popular culture.
Grasser wrote in the thread that they had been given "essentially no brief" and were asked to create a new bird (the site's previous logo had been a similar design, but with a tuft of hair at the top).
Their design was approved in March 2012 and launched two months later, he wrote in the thread.
In 2023, Grasser said he didn't receive any notice or communication from Twitter before the design was unceremoniously replaced. "I found out like everybody else when Elon tweeted it," he said.
He wondered if it was a joke at first, since Musk had jokingly changed the logo to the Dogecoin dog in April. But he soon realized the decision was permanent.
"I am a tiny bit sad," he said. "But at the same time, companies change, logos change, the world changes."
He said he realized the impact of his design when he made the thread on Sunday and received over 10 million impressions. So many users who had apparently passively admired the logo for years suddenly came out to thank Grasser. He compared the effect to seeing a tree on the corner of a street.
"You walk past it every day for 10 years and then it's being cut down, and you're sad," he said.
Grasser on the new "X" logo: 'I try and stay away from commenting on design when I wasn't involved in the process'
When asked about Musk's decision to change the logo to an X, Grasser said he didn't like to criticize other people's work.
"You never know what the constraints were, what the ask was," he said. "I try and stay away from commenting on design when I wasn't involved in the process."
Musk found Twitter's current X logo after posting a tweet soliciting design suggestions. He chose a design suggested by Sawyer Merritt, a co-founder of a clothing company, who said the logo was originally created by the user @ajtourville for a now-defunct podcast the two had made together. Musk celebrated the new design with a post on Monday showing it projected across Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.
As part of Twitter's big rebrand to X, Musk also announced that the company will gradually phase out of its bird associations. In tweet from Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, she vaguely described the site's goal as aspiring toward the "future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities."
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) July 24, 2023
As the change settles in, users have widely ridiculed both Twitter's identity change and the new logo. Many called the design uninspiring and nearly identical to the generic symbol for X in Unicode, or the global computing standard that makes symbols and numeric values consistent across languages.
The graphic designer Anna Dillon juxtaposed Grasser's logo with the new X and wrote: "The twitter bird logo/brand presented a kind, welcoming, open, light-hearted community. I think this new logo/brand is dark & sinister, overtly masculine, unwelcoming and threatening, not to mention rather self-obsessed."
Even though it might not be Twitter's moniker anymore, Grasser said he's proud the logo lasted this long and has become a universal symbol for a bird. He hopes it'll live on in digital culture and bring people joy and nostalgia when they see it in the future.
"I mean, if you asked the world to close its eyes and picture a bird, how many people would have this in their mind?" he said. "There's some accomplishment in there, I'm not sure what it is."