The designer Martin Grasser publicly said goodbye to what is probably his best-known work on Sunday evening. “I just started drawing birds”, wrote him on Twitter. To this end, he published sketches of birds, which he had further reduced to their essentials from draft to draft. He recalled how Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey asked him in 2012 to design the bird logo for the short message service Twitter. “It should be simple, balanced, and recognizable even at very small scale, almost like a lowercase ‘e'”. At the end of his messages about the “great little bird” on Sunday, Grasser put the emoji that salutes.
Elon Musk is far from such a sentimental farewell. The Twitter owner announced on Sunday that Twitter would be renamed “X”: “And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and gradually to all the birds.” As of Monday morning, a white “X” on a black background has replaced the bird icon in the user interface. The little blue bird is dead.
The boss of the electric car manufacturer Tesla took over the group in 2022 for 44 billion dollars. Already in March he had the company in X Corp. renamed. Now he’s implementing his brand change, Musk actually slaps the letter “X” everywhere to say: This is mine. His online bank was already operating under X.com in the 1990s, which was merged into the PayPal payment service, with which Musk laid the foundation for his astronomical wealth. His rocket company, SpaceX, has the letter in its name, as do several of his children. Rumor has it that he would like Twitter to become a multifunctional app with an integrated payment service under the name “X”, similar to Wechat, an app that many Chinese use to regulate their everyday lives. A similar app, Gojek, is also successful in Indonesia.
Sometimes the bird was clever like a raven, sometimes talkative like a parrot
Now Musk is making a visual break with the past – and doing the bird. Twitter means “to tweet” and everyone should be able to tweet along on the social network. In practice, the little blue bird took many forms. Sometimes clever like a raven, sometimes talkative like a parrot, sometimes aggressive, as if Hitchcock had invented him. Twitter users tweeted in many pitches because one thing the bird was sure of: Democrat.
The bird was helpful and not afraid of large animals. When Twitter’s infrastructure went down and the website couldn’t be reached, it would show users a drawing of a whale being carried through the air by several of the birds to cheer them up. Next to the bird was the “Fail Whale” – the whale of failure – has become the mascot of the service. Even before Musk acquired it in 2022, Twitter was known as a chaotic company.
Musk, on the other hand, prefers a look reminiscent of dystopian science fiction – the white X on a black background is intended to replace the soft blue of the bird. A short video showing the new logo is also reminiscent of a message from a long-lost spaceship with background noise and distorted pixels. Musk projected the Batman-style X logo at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Sunday night.
Since Musk has ruled Twitter, the service’s infrastructure has creaked even louder, partly because Musk has thrown out many professionals and is trying to squeeze profits from the company. That doesn’t work so far. With the X-brand, a new beginning should now also succeed economically. However, Musk is finally saying goodbye to Twitter’s cornerstone: a loyal user base who, despite the high nerve factor, considered the medium to be the best place on the Internet to argue about politics and society.
For many addicts, the day began not only with the chirping of birds through the open window, but also with reaching for the cell phone. Then a tap on the bird icon to get into the app, then swiping through the timeline. There were always important questions to be answered: What are the topics of the day? Which celebrity said something stupid? Today, who is put down by the right-wing collective swarm and who by the progressive? All exciting questions that could get your pulse beating even before breakfast. And who doesn’t like to remember highlights of wasting time like the grandmother-is-ne-environmental-pig children’s choir shitstorm or the politicians-may-wear-Rolex scandal?
Meanwhile, many traditional users have fled to other platforms after Musk chanted “Freedom of Speech!” allowed aggressive and far-right Twitter users to return to the platform, which his predecessors had banned under public pressure. There’s no room for the great little bird in this Twitter world.