![]() Mongolian Rhapsody, as the song was once called, included the line, “Mama, there’s a war began / I’ve got to leave tonight.” before getting to the one now in everyone’s head. As with Eliot, the false starts are as fascinating as the final masterpiece. ![]() Written on a British Midland Airways calendar, Mercury’s pencil notation and crossings-out look like a pop version of TS Eliot’s much-amended manuscript of The Waste Land. Beside the singer’s silver Tiffany moustache comb will be the original doodlings that became Bohemian Rhapsody. This week, Sotheby’s in London will display artefacts from its September sale, Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own. His bird, meanwhile, will inevitably become exhibit A in the various museums of lost logos that can be found in dustier corners of the internet, alongside the blue globe of Pan Am and the torn ticket stub of Blockbuster Video.įreddie Mercury’s working lyrics for Bohemian Rhapsody on display earlier this year at Sotheby’s New York. Grasser’s valedictory thread was a brief masterclass in how graphic design can tap into human emotion. Grasser’s thread showed how he had superimposed 15 overlapping circles on the logo to give the bird its optimum “friendly” rotundity (the exact opposite of Elon Musk’s unnerving new black X branding, which puts a cross next to just about every feeling of alienation). His eventual design, after thousands of iterations, was based on a hovering hummingbird with a truncated beak and puffed-up chest. Grasser went away and started sketching different real birds, watching them in flight, listening to birdsong as he worked. Twitter had made some sort of flying goose – but Jack wanted something simpler.” Martin Grasser recalled how, in 2012, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had commissioned him, in terms familiar to creatives everywhere: “There was essentially no brief,” Grasser suggested, “other than ‘we want a new bird, and it should be as good as the Apple and Nike logo’. There was something almost poignant in the Twitter thread last week from one of the original designers of the site’s blue bird logo, soon to be extinct.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |