Fun with Twitter Icons

In real life I'm a complete TV junkie. In addition to the Cultiva Studio Twitter account, I have a personal Twitter account (@lelolai) where I follow TV critics, TV bloggers and actors. One of the folks I follow is Bill Prady, executive producer and show co-creator of The Big Bang Theory. I also follow Simon Helberg (who plays Wolowitz) and Kunal Nayyar (who plays Raj).

On Friday, Bill Prady tweeted that he wanted his followers to redesign his Twitter icon to help promote the show's new day and time. I know this technically falls under spec work and that's bad, but I just wanted to do it for fun. I took it as a challenge. To design an icon that would be legible and branded at sizes as small as 0.5 inches square or smaller if viewed on a smartphone. Because of the small size, I knew it had to be as simple as possible. So although I toyed with using pictures of the actors, in the end I decided to go with just type. Here's what I came up with.

This image is 300 pixels by 300 pixels, and that is the size you'd see if you clicked on the icon and window pops up with the artwork larger. I sent the image off to Bill Prady and he retweeted me and said he really liked it. The following day he had declared my icon the winner, which was very exciting. Then a few hours later, Kunal started using it as his Twitter icon. So for a short while, my little icon was on both their accounts. It was very exciting. Here's a screenshot of my Twitter stream and you can see Bill Prady's old Twitter icon at the top, and my icon is at the bottom where Kunal's posts are. Bill's original icon is nice, but the problem is that the most important information (the new day and time) are lost between the two huge words (Big Bang). So when you see his icon small, it's not very legible.

I had fun designing the icon and I was so happy when it got used. So that is my 15 seconds of fame (I figure time is even more fleeting on the web).

Comments

[Rachel]

Very excellent ... in a small sort of way :) Congrats!