Twitter users who enjoyed the social network before Elon Musk took it over have been mourning its degradation for months, and Sunday night felt like yet another wake. The site’s famous bird logo would soon be gone, Musk announced, and replaced with an X—the single-letter name of the “everything app” that the SpaceX and former X.com founder has promised Twitter will become.
The name and logo change is doing Meta’s new Twitter clone a favor, many users observed. One of the designers of the current iteration of the bird logo marked its passing with a fascinating thread:
And me? I thought of headlines.
“This Bird Has Flown.” “Bye Bye Birdie.” “Twitter’s Bird Has an X on Its Eyes.” “Free Bird.”
Twitter’s visual identity was a gift to newsrooms because of how easily it slid inside metaphors. Birds go up. They go down. They fly in circles. They get buffeted by winds. They go splat. So did Twitter!
And the design possibilities! As I pondered headlines, my colleague Holly Allen messaged me about all the fun Slate’s art team had with that little birdie over the years. Of particular note is Natalie Matthews-Ramo, whose many, many illustrations using the logo attained a poetic poignancy in my eye. “It feels a bit like Nike abandoning the Swoosh,” she told me Monday about the logo’s retirement.
The bird was such a pliable, useful art element, she said, because “it held the Twitter blue well, scaled up and down well, and was never confused with any other words/sites.” In contrast, Facebook’s defining symbol “was just a letter—as the new X will be.”
Is she sad to see the logo go? “I don’t know that I will miss [the logo],” Matthews-Ramo said, “but it will be hard making an X appear anything other than trite.”
Here are some examples from Slate articles over the years. (The one at the top of this article is from a 2018 piece by Will Oremus.)
From a 2022 article about getting hacked by an NFT bot:
From a 2021 article about social-media harassment:
From a recent article about Threads’ threat to Twitter’s business:
From a 2022 article about Twitter’s role in the midterms:
From a 2017 article about Twitter doubling its character limit:
From a 2015 article about a hobbled Twitter being at a crossroads:
From a 2017 article about Twitter’s timeline algorithm:
From a 2017 examination of what Donald Trump was tweeting during Shabbat:
You had a great run, Twitter bird. Mazel tov!
