There is a hot new squiggle on the tech logo scene.
On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Threads, a rival to
Twitter that appears to be the most rapidly downloaded app ever. Each new user
is greeted by the app’s logo, a springy, counterclockwise coil usually rendered
in white against a black background.
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The logo most closely resembles the @ symbol present in
Twitter handles and email addresses. It is just abstract enough, however, to
have earned many other comparisons.
Online, people have speculated that the logo represents the
letter G, the number six, or letters of the Tamil and Malayalam alphabets. An
edited image of Homer Simpson is circulating in which the character’s ear has
been replaced by the logo. Others have detected similarities to a snippet of
thread or a curly piece of hair.
“If a Möbius strip and an ampersand had a kid, it would sort
of look like that,” said Rob Janoff, the designer who created the rainbow Apple
logo.
Janoff said the logo’s ambiguity will probably end up
helping people remember it. He likes the logo, which he said is close enough to
the @ sign to feel familiar to viewers but distinctive enough to attract their
attention.
Graphic designer Jessica Walsh thinks it is a little too
confusing. “I didn’t understand it when I saw it,” she said in an email. She
said she would have tried to put the letter “T,” for “Threads,” at the center
of the logo instead.
Like most modern corporate icons, the Threads logo is
required to be highly adaptable. It must be legible on a billboard or a phone
screen, and must register with customers who speak a variety of languages.
The design may also be aimed to improve Meta’s damaged
public image, said Michael Evamy, the author of “Logo,” an anthology of
corporate brands and logos. “New identities, by their nature, are meant to mask
the weaknesses or faults of an organization and project a certain set of
values,” he said.
The loopy design of the Threads logo appears friendly and
nonthreatening, Evamy said. He compared it to a piece of spaghetti. “When you see
it, you forget for a moment about who and what’s behind it,” he said.
Tech companies have increasingly settled on minimal,
single-line symbols to represent their brands. In Apple’s App Store, the
Threads logo sits atop TikTok’s music note, Snapchat’s ghost and YouTube’s
arrow.
The Threads logo both extends and jolts the ultrasmooth logo
trend, said Fons Mans, a designer and the founder of 10X Designers. “It has a
freehand feel to it,” he said. “It makes it feel a little more human than those
pixel-perfect logos we’ve seen in tech in the past few years.”
Some streamlined logos have irritated designers. When
Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, it introduced a blue infinity icon
that drew a muted response for its perceived lack of imagination. “We needed to
future-proof the symbol,” Meta’s design team said.
According to Meta, the Threads logo is realized in
Instagram’s sans serif font and is inspired by the @ sign.
The lively, asymmetrical Threads logo may indicate that
designers at Meta are aware of those criticisms. Renato Valdés Olmos, a former
director of design at Lyft, said the Threads logo is noticeably more
“outspoken” than Meta’s.
“It’s very much a designer’s logo,” he said. Its
white-on-black palette is “goth”, he added, and its lack of harsh edges implies
the kind of easy-flowing communication that the app is attempting to
facilitate.
Threads is the latest Twitter competitor to nod to the
platform’s visual identity, which is represented by a sky-blue bird. The
alternative social platform Mastodon also selected an animal (albeit an extinct
one) as its mascot. And both Mastodon and Bluesky, another competitor, were
splashed with hues of blue not too distant from Twitter’s.
Ramesh Srinivasan, the director of the University of
California Digital Cultures Lab, said the Threads logo is a shrewd reference to
a different piece of Twitter’s iconography: the @ symbol, which appears before
each Twitter user’s personal handle and has become deeply associated with the
platform.
“It’s basically saying, ‘Hey, we’re Twitter,’” he said.
“It’s a clever interface in what it expresses, but I don’t find it visually
alluring.”
Many Twitter users have also criticized the logo, perhaps
out of allegiance to their preferred platform.
Valdés Olmos said that logos often spark intense reactions
online because each can be a convenient outlet for a person’s feelings about a
brand. “The logo is the first thing you tap, the first thing you get greeted
by,” he said. “That makes it an easy target for a lot of folks.”
Evamy is confident the Threads logo will weather its round
of online teasing. He thinks the abstract design may even be more durable than
Twitter’s blue bird, which is rendered in a pictorial style that he said now
feels dated.
“If Twitter were starting again, they would probably want to
have something this good for their own logo,” he said.
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