How I got to design one of the most exposed logos in the world
In the year 2006, I was working with one of my heroes Amy Franceschini who founded the first digital design studio in San Francisco in 1995. Among one of the most historical projects, she designed the first Starwars website together with George Lucas in person! As a part of my education at Hyper Island I served my internship as a junior designer at Futurefarmers and ended up working as Amy’s sidekick for 7 years designing websites, games, and identities.
When Noah Glass, the father of Odeo* and co-founder of Twittr (yes, you read it right) contacted Futurefarmers to say that he finally had a budget to realize his dream to work with us on a project, I thought it was one of those projects we would do and never see again.
I’m humble enough to know that I don’t know anything, but I honestly didn’t think that Twitter would make it. It was a website with 30k active users posting pictures of coffee cups on their desks with a message under 140 characters received as a text to your phone. I thought the idea was dumb. Little did I know…
We agreed to design the website and identity in three days and worked day and night with minimal sleep to finish everything while Noah tweeted frequently about how excited he was.
Working with Futurefarmers was intense, and the fuel was adrenaline because in those days we always had the overhanging feeling we would get sued if we didn’t finish in time and delivered what we promised. These days, we charge the client for the extra time it takes to deliver a job well done.
I didn’t feel that I had time to design a logo because I was already overwhelmed by the list of things that had to be done that were more important, but I set off half a day to make 20 different logotype suggestions or so for Noah to point me in the right direction. But he didn’t do that. He just picked one, saying “it’s perfect!” I said, “it’s not perfect, I need to fix it!”We didn’t have time for that, and he insisted we’d use it as it was.
Had I known that it would become one of the most exposed logos in the world, even for a short time — the logo that I’d have to identify with for the rest of my life as a logo designer, I would have cared more, but at that moment I just thought “fine, whatever” hoping it wouldn’t bite me in the ass later on.
I used the Pico Alphabet and modified the ts and used the e from Helvetica rounded.
Because I’m often asked if I designed the Twitter bird, here’s a brief history of the Twitter logo:
2005 Noah Glass created the first Twittr-version
2006 Linda Leow designed a new Twitter-version
2010 The first Twitter bird — a stock image by Simon Oxley was added.
2012 The current Twitter bird is designed by Martin Grasser
What I learned from this project is that it’s not the end of the world if you can’t deliver a perfectly balanced logo within a limited time frame. A poorly designed logo can’t stop a beast like Twitter because it’s fueled by the life force of every active user, and their higher minds aka bots.
During the presidency of Donald Trump I had an irrational moment and deleted my Twitter account. I created a new one, and invite you to add me if you wish: https://twitter.com/LindaLeow
Thank you for reading this far! I hope you learned something new.
*Noah developed a product where you call a phone number and it would turn your message into an MP3 hosted on the Internet that became Odeo that was a directory and search destination website for RSS-syndicated audio and video. It employed tools that enabled users to create, record, and share podcasts with a simple Adobe Flash-based interface.
