Twitter Bird Icon History
From .wired.com/epicenter
Twitter Paid $6 or Less for Crowdsourced ‘Birdie’ Graphic
Simon Oxley, the Japan-based Brit who licensed the bird graphic to Twitter for the price of a sandwich, through iStockphoto, sits somewhere in the middle.
“I
am not sure [whether crowdsourcing hurts designers],” he said via e-mail. “I believe a designer can only be ‘hurt’ when they stand in line — instead of constantly seeking new inspiration and producing new things with their ever-increasing experiences.”
Fair enough. But since Twitter, which now ranks above Digg as the 84th most popular website in the world according to Hitwise, doesn’t sell any merchandise depicting the bird or use it as their official logo (it’s considered a “decorative element”), the company only had to pay Oxley his share of iStockphoto’s licensing fee.
An iStockphoto spokeswoman told wired.com that Twitter paid between $10 and $15 for Oxley’s bird design. Considering that iStockphoto pays 20 or 40 percent to content creators depending on their membership, Oxley made somewhere between $2 and $6 for designing the Twitter homepage graphic. Carolyn Davidson, who famously earned only $35 for designing the Nike swoosh, actually made out pretty well by comparison.
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