One Bird to Rule Them All: Twitter Tweaks Its Branding Strategy

Throughout the company’s history, Twitter’s branding has consisted of a handful of icons, each distinct in its own way while remaining recognizably Twitter-esque. There’s the lowercase “t” symbol surrounded by an app-like square, the familiar bubbled text of Twitter spelled out in full, and, of course, the company’s little blue bird mascot.

But more than one icon can be too many. At least, that’s the philosophy Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman seems to espouse. Twitter will lose all superfluous branding images — like said bubble text and “t” icons — offering instead a single, iconic image: A redesigned little blue bird.

Think of it as a sort of brand consolidation, akin to Nike’s iconic swoosh. Instead of the disparate ways Twitter’s brand appears in public, it’ll be one bird, one logo for partners to use and the general public to see. It’s smart, too: Simplicity is a hallmark of brand building, boiling down a product into a single concept, captured in an image.

Simplicity is the key word for Twitter in the company’s maturation process. It aims to become a service that non-techno-savvy users can understand — just look at last year’s complete site overhaul.

Here’s a super-short video on just how simple the new image is: It is composed entirely from three sets of overlapping circles, chopped up to form the new image. Cute. And smart.