Whenever you catch yourself talking about 140 characters, fail whales, and RTs (and let’s not forget, hashtags), you can rest assured that at least one person online completely gets that you’re referring to Twitter, without even a hint of confusion. And the same applies to that little blue bird: You see it, you know we’re talking about Twitter.
Twitter’s logo is certainly a quintessential social media landmark, but before it took the form of a brand permanently ingrained in our brains, it took a number of logo studies before the end design was finalized. Nick Bilton, author of Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, revealed that before the founders settled on Twitter as the company’s name, they considered titles such as “Twitch,” “Friendstalker” and “Smssy” – they actually even went with the vowel-free alternative “Twttr” during the site’s early stages.
Most of the early logo re-designs were created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, but none of it ended up being featured on the site’s page. What ended up being the platform’s first known logo sort of resembled Flubber, designed by lesser-known Twitter co-founder Noah Glass. Check out the gallery to see all the brand contenders Bilton shares on his book, before our beloved micro-blogging site went the completely-blue route.
