“Messing with the Twitter brand.”

During Apple’s recent WWDC keynote they presented a sharing feature in their new OS that included a modified Twitter logo.

Not that long ago, June 6th to be exact, Twitter announced a subtle but major change to their branding. This change not only modified how the bird was designed but it focused on establishing strict guidelines that excluded the “Twitter” name as well as any past version of the bird and the “t”. 

In Apple’s presentation they chose to not obey by these guidelines and accompanied the new Twitter bird with a nice sans serif font spelling out “Twitter”. 

From these actions, Apple must’ve believe that many would not understand what the bird resembled.

Graham Smith has this to say:

In Apple’s case, and for the purposes of driving home a certain application sharing feature, they “presumably” felt the Twitter bird wasn’t/isn’t clear/strong enough to stand on it’s own especially when in a list of other brands with full brand names? I would have agreed with this until I Photoshopped the Twitter name out.

Smith is right. Even though the Twitter service has only been around for half a decade they’ve managed to establish an icon that doesn’t need any text. You almost get this feeling that Apple doesn’t believe this can happen, but in reality when Apple released their updated multi-colored logo in 1977 by Rob Janoff they could have easily dropped the “apple” text.

Armin at Brand New had this to say about Twitter’s move:

For the most part, all the news sources reporting on the revised bird have focused on its visual update, which I will get to soon, but the real story here is that Twitter has dropped its name from the logo. If you look at the opening image of this post, the change is quite drastic. And ballsy. Twitter has achieved in less than six years what Nike, Apple, and Target took decades to do: To be recognizable without a name, just an icon. If you go to Twitter’s home page, welcoming you at the top is the new bird, and nothing more. Gone is the bubbly, lowercase “twitter” wordmark and the “t” icon — both terribly annoying designs. Regardless of the changes to the bird, this is a very significant evolution of the Twitter brand. 

Twitter did choose to be integrated with Apple’s iOS and maybe part of this partnership doesn’t give Apple the same guidelines and responsibilities as the rest of us have. 

In a few words: Twitter made the right move, others should follow, and Apple will just be Apple. 

• Source imjustcreative.com

• 06/13/12