The original Larry, to which the present icon bears little resemblance, was created by Simon Oxley, a British graphic designer who has since produced many mascots for online companies. The blue bird was just one illustration he offered for sale on the iStock website in 2006, where someone at Twitter bought it for about $15 (you can still download a variation of it for the bargain price of $11). As early adopters of the platform may recall, Oxley’s bird is a slender, serene fellow, adorned only by a stylized eye and perched on a branch that splits off into an elegant Japanese-­influenced gathering of curlicues.

When Twitter selected his design, Oxley wasn’t even aware of the company’s existence. “I seem to recall a friend sending me an email telling me,” he says now. “It was fun to witness more and more sightings and see CNN and the BBC mentioning it with images of my bird alongside the story.” But because companies aren’t permitted to use iStock images as official logos, Twitter soon left Oxley’s bird behind. Biz Stone, a company founder, came up with the initial design for the first in-house bird logo, fine-tuning it by 2009 with the help of Philip Pascuzzo, a designer. A year later, they created yet another version of the logo — its cartoonish features silhouetted away — which was eventually further streamlined by Bowman into its current form.