Use this image to illustrate articles on, presentations about & screeds against Google+. It’d be swell if you linked to my portfolio.
Who doesn’t need a good vector Facebook icon once in a while? Trouble is, there are so darn many social actions on the ‘Book these days, a designer needs more than a mere ‘F’ in a box!
So download these vector (Windows AI CS4) files here, why dontcha. My gift to you!
Bonus production assistance: need to type Facebooky stuff? The Facebook font sure looks like Lucida Grande.
In light of my recent dissertation on Twitter’s damn bird, the last thing I ever want to see is another blue avian anything, but here you go. Available on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.
Not your cup of tea? How ’bout this older, but no less adorable, free Twitter bird? I’m full of ‘em!
Behold Winnipeg ad campaign Recycle Everywhere! I chased buses for days to bring you these shots, so take a minute to really behold.
If you’re confused what this ad campaign (designed to ease in new, higher recycling levies in Winnipeg) has to do with Twitter, so am I.
The crux of the branding seems to be a small blue bird with voice balloons. Hallmarks of, you know, the 10th most famous digital brand.
It’s a lovely brand, I just think someone’s using it right now.
I’m struggling with whether the designers:
Modern birds have had their own look for roughly 65 million years. Can Twitter own the notion of a bird, or subset of birds (the blue ones)? If a brand spawns thousands of mashup logos, does it really make a sound?
Twitter famously licensed the first bird on iStockphoto for roughly $6. Designer Simon Oxley still sells it there for 14 credits.
That Twitter didn’t feel the need to purchase the icon outright like they did with Yiying Lu’s Fail Whale suggests they don’t want to ‘own’ the bird as logo. It’s a “decorative element”, branding wall art.
The thing with Twitter is that the community really took the wall art and ran with it. You can find literally infinite permutations, literally, of Twitter’s blue bird and they all mean ‘tweet’.
Logo liberty is one of the sticky factors of the Twitter brand. In true crowdsourced, Web-2.0-at-it’s-best fashion we are all permitted to customize the brand to suit us while still projecting the brand essence. That’s because the brand essence is crowdsourcing and participation. It’s a unique medium-is-the-message branding model born of a cultural shift to group brand ownership.
Let’s examine the extent of this Bird of the Crowd metamorphosis, shall we?
A marriage of Twitter’s corporate blue and Oxley’s iconic (not blue) bird, blue birds from a variety of artistic traditions were the first mascots to say “Twitter”. Beyond style preference, designers inserted their attitude visually as a means to convey their communication style (“I’m cute! I’m fun!”) or expertise (“I’m a freakin’ NINJA with WOLVERINE CLAWS!).
We don’t all have blue websites, so soon all manner and species of bird came to symbolize a link to the Twitterverse. Twitter’s bird mindshare grew to encompass every bird.
The whole ‘bird’ idea began to abstract, to simplify, to fly like a small blue bird to the wide open sky of possibilities, of barely-birds.
With the bird concept now optional, the final ties to the corporate brand lay in colour. Twitter icons expanded to include anything in a fresh Web 2.0-y shade of blue.
Blue is so limiting. So are birds. There’s no reason a piece of toast can’t symbolize Twitter.
I’m sure you can appreciate the scope of the designer’s problem. If Twitter’s brand encompasses blue birds, all other birds, everything blue, and anything that isn’t blue or a bird, we’re going to need to open up more of the visual spectrum or something if we want to keep creating distinctive work.
This does make it tough to brand new products and services. Perhaps we’ve reached the end of branding, and it’s safe to start over again with small blue birds.
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2011 Nominations: Canadian Weblog Awards in Best Written, Business & Career, and the Science, Technology & the Internet categories.
