What’s the name of the bird that you see on Twitter?  

You've probably seen many versions of Twitter's bird logo by now. But do you know, the bird has a name? It is called Larry. But how did Larry get his name? Well, Larry, the bird, is named after the former basketball legend Larry Bird from NBA games. 

Why Larry Bird?  
Twitter is often noisy. Bird is often silent. In his playing days, the now 65-year-old Larry Bird was a reputed trash talker. But that was only on the court. By personality, Bird prefered to stay out of the limelight, unlike his flashier contemporaries Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.  

Born in 1974, Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, was most absorbent to the Bird era being a teenager at that time. It was probably the greatest era of basketball, when sneaker brands, Spike Lee, Jordan, Magic, and Bird combined to take the game to great heights. Maybe that inspired Stone to choose Larry Bird to represent his company’s logo.  

Evolution of the bird logo 
Mocked up ahead of the company’s launch, the prototype logo designed by its co-founder Noah Glass was completely unrecognisable when compared to what we have today.  

Instead of the soothing sky blue, twttr was represented by green which wasn’t so found so appealing. So for its official launch in 2006, the Twitter founders turned to graphic designer Linda Gavin, who was given just one day. The new logo was a delightful departure from the prelaunch version. It was a simple wordmark featuring a unique rounded typeface, with the letters in small caps and no spacing between them.  

In 2010, the founders decided to add something to the logo that would reflect its identity. This was when the bird was born along with the Twitter name, and it was said to symbolise the nature of a tweet — quick and short, just like the noises a bird would make.  

In 2012, the founders again thought of making the logo simpler by dropping the Twitter wordmark and the next design saw the introduction of the current bird icon. The bird, a mountain bluebird, was redesigned to a more symmetrical, clean-cut look with wings made up of three overlapping circles. 

Twitter – the success story  
A result of a "day-long brainstorming session" back in 2006, Twitter has come a long way over the last 16 years. But do you know when it was just starting, Twitter wasn't even called Twitter? Inspired by the photo-sharing platform Flickr, and the five-character length of American SMS short codes, the creators originally named the site 'twttr'.  

Today, with close to 500 million users, you would agree that the social media app is has become one of the favourites and its signature bird can be seen almost everywhere. But current logo was only adopted recently in the evolutionary history of Twitter's logos.