Twitter has replaced its longtime bird logo with an X in order to fit owner Elon Musk's preferred aesthetic. Musk is famously a fan of the letter X, applying it to everything from his companies to his children's names.
The branding change comes about three months after Musk officially replaced Twitter the company with a successor firm called X Corp. Over the weekend, Musk wrote that "soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," and invited users to come up with a new logo. He also wrote that a tweet will now be called an "X," and noted that his X.com domain now redirects to Twitter.
Musk chose a logo offered by a Twitter user but wrote that it will probably be changed later and "certainly will be refined." The X logo was suggested yesterday by Sawyer Merritt, who initially said it had been used for a now-discontinued podcast about Musk.
The logo rushed out by Musk doesn't seem to be very original. People pointed out that it looks just like a decades-old Unicode character. "Unicode character U+1D54F (𝕏) was added to Unicode in 2001 and has been used in mathematical text books since the 70s. I'm looking forward to Twitter attempting and failing to trademark their new logo," wrote Matthew Scroggs, a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London.
As The Verge wrote, this is why Musk was "able to tweet the logo in an entirely text-based tweet."
Monotype font has very similar X
Font enthusiast Fontendo wrote that the logo is an X "from the font 'Special Alphabets 4' from Monotype's Special Alphabets font family." Fontendo posted screenshots showing that Twitter's new X logo looks like the letter in Special Alphabets 4.
You can view the original font here. The logo that's now on Twitter's website looks like the lower-case letter from the font.
Merritt corrected himself, writing that the X he initially posted came directly from the font and is not his podcast logo. He said that the designer of his podcast logo "was inspired by a font he found online." The actual podcast logo is a thicker X than the one in the earlier Merritt tweet that Musk chose for Twitter's new logo.
Musk is calling it an "interim X logo." The future logo that replaces it will presumably be more unique.
We contacted Monotype about Twitter's logo today and received a response: "Regarding your question on the Twitter X logo, we can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s 'Special Alphabets 4,'" said Phil Garnham, executive creative director at Monotype. We asked Monotype to clarify whether the Twitter logo is the lower-case x from Special Alphabets 4 and will update this article if we get an answer.
Creator of Twitter bird reminisces
Twitter's bird icon debuted over a decade ago after considerably more forethought. It was designed in 2012 by three people, including Martin Grasser, who wrote a thread reminiscing on the creation of the logo.
"The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase 'e,'" he wrote. Twitter's only instruction to the design team was, "we want a new bird, and it should be as good as the Apple and Nike logo," according to Grasser.
Grasser started by drawing birds, and one of the sketches eventually morphed into the well-known blue logo after the team "spent our time perfecting every little detail... so that it felt balanced, and visible as a bird at the smallest of sizes. Sometime in March we had an approved bird and it launched in May of 2012. This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years," Grasser wrote.
X will be everything
To mark the logo change, Musk posted a series of X-related tweets (or X-related Xs), including one image of the Twitter headquarters with a large X projected on the side of the building. While the Twitter.com domain still exists, Musk reportedly told Twitter employees "that he'd just sent them the last email he'd ever send from a Twitter email address."
In line with Musk's goal of making an "everything app," recently hired Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote yesterday that "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine."
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