Elon Musk has revealed a new logo for Twitter, choosing a “minimalist art deco” X as part of a rebrand of the platform.
The Twitter owner indicated that the design would be altered, tweeting that it “probably changes later, certainly will be refined”. Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, confirmed the choice on Monday by tweeting the design and writing: “X is here! Let’s do this.”
X is here! Let’s do this. pic.twitter.com/1VqEPlLchj
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 24, 2023
Musk had appealed to his 149 million followers for design ideas and appears to have chosen a logo that he had flagged on Sunday via a flickering video pinned to the top of his Twitter feed.
The “X” has long been an obsession of Musk’s and is his name for an “everything app” that he has pledged to launch at some point – with Twitter the likely vehicle. Shortly before buying Twitter in October, Musk described the social media platform as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”.
After taking over Twitter in October last year, Musk folded the company into an entity called X Corp, whose parent is X Holdings Corp. This month, the Tesla CEO announced that he was forming a new artificial intelligence company called xAI.
The crowdsourced logo had been posted by Twitter user Sawyer Merritt, the co-founder of a sustainable clothing business, who tweeted that the font had been used for a discontinued podcast. The logo is taken from unicode, an international industrial standard for encoding text characters so that they can be displayed online.
The Twitter logo is based on a unicode font called Blackboard bold, which leaves open questions about whether the logo can be copyrighted or protected as a trademark.
“Companies usually spend large sums of money designing a unique logo to stand out from the crowd, so choosing a standard character that anyone else can use seems very peculiar,” said Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University.
The X concept is modelled on WeChat, the Chinese platform that allows users to perform multiple functions, from messaging to ordering a taxi and paying bills. In June last year, Musk reportedly told Twitter staff: “You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”
Yaccarino gave some details on Sunday of how she expected X to work, tweeting that the business would be AI-powered and “centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking”. As of Monday morning, the desktop version of Twitter was displaying the new logo in place of its signature bird symbol, and the official Twitter account had been changed to the X brand.
The rebrand has already begun at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, where the company has projected the X logo on and within the building and reportedly renamed conference rooms to words that include X.
One analyst warned that the rebranding move was high-risk given the competitive outlook for Twitter, which is suffering financially from advertisers withholding spending and the emergence of a “Twitter killer” rival called Threads, launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
“By changing Twitter’s app name, Elon Musk will have singlehandedly wiped out over 15 years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon,” said Mike Proulx, research director at the analysis firm Forrester.
“This is an extremely risky move, because with ‘X’, Musk is essentially starting over while its competition is afoot.”
