Elon Musk Officially Debuts Minimalistic X Logo & Rebrand From Twitter
As the blue bird flees the nest, Elon Musk has just officially unveiled its successor: X. The rebrand symbolizes the social media platform’s eventual shift into an “everything app.”
Before landing on the new design, Musk had asked his followers for ideas, and on Monday, CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed the choice. The logo consists of a basic ‘X’ on a black background and will now replace the previous icon on the browser. However, mobile users will still be able to view the blue bird.
X is here! Let’s do this. pic.twitter.com/1VqEPlLchj
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 24, 2023
The new icon was presented by user Sawyer Merritt, who posted the Unicode letter (an international industry standard for encoding text characters), which Musk eventually chose.
The font for X is called Blackboard Bold and was the choice for a now-discontinued podcast. It will likely be used as an interim option until a new one is designed. Musk tweeted that the finalized product will be reworked and refined.
In October, after Musk bought over the platform, he folded the company into an entity called X Corp, whose parent is X Holdings Corp. That, coupled with the fact that he just announced a new artificial intelligence company called xAI, would make the renaming fit in with his empire of X-named companies. However, it has confused users on the site about what tweets will be called from now on.
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 23, 2023
To that, Musk responded and said “x’s” while on brand, it doesn’t really roll off the tongue quite like “Tweets” does.
According to The Guardian, Mike Proulx, a research director at the analysis firm Forrester, noted that Twitter has become part of our cultural lexicon over the last 15 years, and the rebrand will have wiped that all away. With X looming over its dying form, what could users on the app expect to happen? And will it have the same cultural impact as Twitter once had?
x’s
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023
Ultimately, we’ll only know if it’s true reception once the app turns into the “everything app” Musk is talking about. He likens X’s future to that of WeChat in China, where the platform not only stands as a text messaging app but a place where people can do everything from money transactions to online shopping.
[via Reuters and The Guardian, cover image via Linda Yaccarino]
