The Twitter Logo, Or Is It?

Do a Google image search on “twitter logo”.

Here, if you’re lazy.

See? Although it does show up, the bird we think we know from Twitter isn’t the service’s logo. The official Twitter logo, as Gedeon Maheux from the Iconfactory pointed out in this 2007 archive post, is a logotype.

This one, to be precise:

Yet, when I ran into Birdie recently, the first thing I thought was “Twitter rip-off”.

See for yourself:

So why is that?

In the same post, Maheux described how the Twitter bird itself had become almost synonymous with Twitter, even back then. So much so, in fact, that every other third-party app had begun using a bird as their logo.

Including the Iconfactory’s own Twitteriffic:

And there have been a few others as well:

So why did Birdie remind me of Twitter so much, apart from the prominent blues in its design and a possible case of the Twitter Identity Transference Syndrome Maheux posted about?

Well, Twitter does use birds. When you sign out of Twitter (huh?!) and take the tour, you know you’ll see these three very different illustrations:

Except for the first one perhaps, none of them actually look like the Birdie bird at all. The second feels distinctly Oriental to me, and number three is clearly a humming bird.

Of course there is the bird Twitter uses when it is down, being tweaked or has its feathers groomed:

When something has gone really wrong, even the bird itself gets upset:

A more recent one is this, which features a bird as well, be it yet another one, and less prominently (kindly pointed out and sent to me by Joe Lencioni):

But now that Twitter hasn’t been down in a while, and most of us are on third-party apps anyways, I hadn’t seen these for some time.

So, now when you look at the images above and the birdie logo, they couldn’t be more different.

Still, this image is what people often use when referring to Twitter, or when they try to come up with a twitterlike image for a new mashup.

It is also the one that reminds us of Twitter and makes us accuse people of ripping-off a design, even when the bird is white, faces the other way, and, well, doesn’t look like it at all.

In a way, that’s a strong brand image, I suppose. You see a bird, you cry Twitter. But perhaps it’s also a pity it was precisely this one, the error bird, which stuck.

Being remembered for your error messages is never a good thing it seems.

Addendum: Cormac Kelly explains where both his and the Twitter logo come from in his post The Birdie Brand and the Twitter Bird. Thanks for the mention Cormac.