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Violate Twitter Brand Guidelines

violatetwitterbrandguidelines.com

161 pointsbertrandom57 comments

I love that someone did this. Twitter is crazy if they think anyone without API access and a financial stake is actually going to bother to listen to their brand guidelines.

One of the things that made Twitter a great brand is that end users got to kind of invent a little bit of the brand whenever they promoted their Twitter accounts on their sites and other places. It encouraged creativity that eventually extended to what the users posted on the service.

Why bow to the gods of uniformity after half a decade of freedom? With the reach of their network and the level of influence they've built, don't they have something better to spend their time on?

I don't think they really expect everyone to listen to their guidelines. However, in order to maintain their trademark, I believe they have to defend it actively. I think this page is more a way to appease the lawyers than anything else.

Of course, I know literally nothing about the laws in question and could be off base entirely.

Twitter is well served to defend their trademark against dilution, perhaps, but I'm not sure that the law requires they protect it against bad design.

I'm pretty sure that these guidelines are exactly about protecting against dilution. I think the logic is as follows--the actual Twitter logo (and, consequently, trademark) is not just a bird, it's that specific bird, in that orientation and that color. Allowing anybody to do anything with it would dilute it. And so they must protect against this.

For what it's worth, I've certainly seen documents like this from other companies. Based on these observations (rather than the actual law :/), I think that what they're doing is part of protecting it from dilution.

WordPress is certainly an example: http://wordpress.org/about/logos/

I've seen quite a few brand standard manuals in my time in the creative industry, and this is the most memorable way I've ever seen to cover the "don'ts" section.

Press chirp. Press rotate three times. Press multiply many times. Press ledge.

Result: many Twitter birds beak-planting into the ground and farting in surprise.

They'll have to add that to the unit tests.

Press multiply ~30 times. Press disco.

Now spam rotate. :)

Disco party!

Load the page, enter this in the address bar:

javascript:setInterval(function () { $('#btn_rotate').click(); }, 400);setInterval(function () { $('#btn_multiply').click(); }, 300);$('#btn_disco').click(); setInterval(function () { $('#btn_disco').click(); $('#btn_disco').click(); }, 300);

Epileptic Psychedelic dance party!

"don't copy our look and feel" https://twitter.com/about/logos#visual-design

Uh, like bootstrap.js? :)

It took me about five minutes to figure out what was the point of this website. I'm on a 13in Macbook Pro and didn't realize you could scroll down to see the buttons. Does it bother anyone else when people design websites for tall screens that most people on laptops just don't have?

Scrollbars - Crazy right?

On Mac OS X Lion, in Safari, scroll bars are hidden by default. They are only shown when you start to scroll, using either the arrow keys or the two-finger-drag gesture. So if the page looks complete and you don't try to scroll because of that, you have no indication that there is more to the page.

Edit: the scroll bar is also shown briefly when the page finishes loading.

Reasonable people would, in my humble opinion, consider that a failing of your insane OS, and not of the producer of the web page.

It feels pretty natural though, when you get used to it. Doesn't bother at all. OSX's scrolling I mean.

Well, except when it does, it seems...

having to "get used to" something means its not natural in the first place! Otherwise, you'd already be "used to it".

The scroll bar also briefly appears when switching tabs.

You can't justify poor design by saying that he could have use scrollbars. It is clearly the designer's fault to not have thought of this.

WorldWideWeb had scroll bars. Since day one of the web, browsers have been expected to gracefully handle documents with too much content to easily render on one screen. It's not reasonable for every author worldwide to have to simultaneously munge all their documents just because one browser maintainer woke up thinking it would look cooler for you not to know if there's more to read.

What resolution? It seems fine on my 11 inch Air @ 1366x768.

1280x800... i didnt have safari maximized but it was a pretty big window already. Even after maximizing it the follow button was still below the fold, when clearly this entire website was designed to be viewed in one window.

Here's what I see on a maximized browser window at 1280x800, without modifying zoom at all: http://i.imgur.com/2yKz8.png

Do you have a lot of toolbars on your browser or something? Huge font size?

I don't see the buttons on Chrome before scrolling on my 13" MBP, but since I'm stubbornly sticking to 10.6 I did get a nice big scrollbar to let me know to scroll down. :)

No now you're justifying 'the fold' and it tyranny over webdesign :(

"The fold" is important in many places; games and other web applications should indeed be visible from the start. It's true, we have now scroll bars and scroll wheels and scroll areas on our touchpads, so it's not as important as it was in press, but it surely does need to be considered. It always upsets me to see news sites which have too much crap at the top of the screen getting between me and the thing I came there to read.

In this case, you are simply wrong about the application of "the fold", though. The point is, this is a simple web page containing a link and an application. The application is large enough that it cannot be reasonably guessed to live in the top 400-500 pixels of the screen. So there should have been a visual cue to distinguish the application, perhaps a box around it, so that people who have not yet seen the buttons at the bottom will scroll down and see them. Right now you have no idea where the application resides, and that is the complaint.

I am unsure why I find this hilarious.

I think it's the can't-un-see Batman logo.

Doesn't work in Mobile Safari. (Does it use legacy technologies like Flash or Java?)

Pinch to zoom out. The bird is probably off-screen.

Nope.

The bird is scrolled off to the right on my iPhone.

Works fine here in the iPad (both in Safari and another browser).

Java and flash each have current install bases of 1,000,000,000+ devices and are adding devices at a rate that far outstrips mobile safari. Neither are shiny, cool technologies, but they're not "legacy technologies" yet.

It's not just mobile safari. Mobile in general doesn't support Flash.

Android has supported it since v 2.2 (at least 3 years since HTC Hero), and I've used it on Samsung, Motorola and HTC devices. Blackberries also have a deep implementation of AIR.

Are there actually any higher-end phones or tablets made by anyone other than Apple that don't support flash? I'm genuinely curious since I love to play on kongregate.com during commutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG2WYOkkp_g https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adobe.flas...

Flash player for mobile was discontinued last year [1]. So, yeah, Flash won't be around on tablets or phones for long.

1. http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/11/flash-to-focus-...

Actually, the player hasn't been discontinued at all. It's still supported and bugfixes are still released. The decision was not to develop new versions in the future and instead to focus on flash apps via AIR. As of now, Android and Blackberry both support the newest version-- version 11, with 3D hardware acceleration.

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/11/flash-to-focus-...

In a generation or two, flash may indeed be "legacy" for mobile browser clients. That has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the web market or the "mobile in general doesn't support flash" claim, which is verifiably false.

The very definition of discontinued is no new versions. Bug fixes and support don't change that.

As the majority of mobile devices in users' hands today do not support Flash, it is indeed fair to say "mobile in general doesn't support Flash". Again, that's the definition of "in general".

If you rotate the bird 180 degrees and add the chirp, you get a farting bird.

Listen to this and keep clicking Disco for awesomeness :D

http://soundcloud.com/wolfganggartner/flexx-teaser

Maybe it's just me, change aversion and all, but the new bird is a bit odd and not friendly anymore. It's facing up in an angelic pose, tilting it's head back in ecstasy.

uiuiuiui

https://twitter.com/about/logos

someone at twitter must have had to much time at his (or her) hands.

The favicon on that page violates the brand guidelines.

As does the MacOS client available in the App Store. http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/twitter/id409789998?mt=12

My favorite: "Don't: Copy our look and feel, as this could create user confusion."

Ummmmm... https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap

Everyday I'm violatin'

rule 34?

very good, I laughed a lot.

What is this?

I know Twitter recently changed (standardized) their logo but how is this site relevant?