Twitter has changed its longtime hen brand with an X to be able to match proprietor Elon Musk’s most popular aesthetic. Musk is famously a fan of the letter X, making use of it to all the pieces from his firms to his kids’s names.
The branding change comes about three months after Musk formally changed Twitter the corporate with a successor agency known as X Corp. Over the weekend, Musk wrote that “quickly we will bid adieu to the twitter model and, steadily, all of the birds,” and invited customers to provide you with a brand new brand. He additionally wrote {that a} tweet will now be known as an “X,” and famous that his X.com area now redirects to Twitter.
Musk selected a brand supplied by a Twitter consumer however wrote that it’ll in all probability be modified later and “definitely shall be refined.” The X brand was urged yesterday by Sawyer Merritt, who initially mentioned it had been used for a now-discontinued podcast about Musk.
The emblem rushed out by Musk would not appear to be very unique. Folks identified that it seems to be similar to a decades-old Unicode character. “Unicode character U+1D54F (𝕏) was added to Unicode in 2001 and has been utilized in mathematical textual content books for the reason that 70s. I am wanting ahead to Twitter trying and failing to trademark their new brand,” wrote Matthew Scroggs, a postdoctoral analysis fellow at College School London.
As The Verge wrote, for this reason Musk was “capable of tweet the emblem in a completely text-based tweet.”
Monotype font has very comparable X
Font fanatic Fontendo wrote that the emblem is an X “from the font ‘Particular Alphabets 4’ from Monotype’s Particular Alphabets font household.” Fontendo posted screenshots exhibiting that Twitter’s new X brand seems to be just like the letter in Particular Alphabets 4.
You’ll be able to view the unique font right here. The emblem that is now on Twitter’s web site seems to be just like the lower-case letter from the font.
Merritt corrected himself, writing that the X he initially posted got here straight from the font and isn’t his podcast brand. He mentioned that the designer of his podcast brand “was impressed by a font he discovered on-line.” The precise podcast brand is a thicker X than the one within the earlier Merritt tweet that Musk selected for Twitter’s new brand.
Musk is calling it an “interim X brand.” The longer term brand that replaces it should presumably be extra distinctive.
We contacted Monotype about Twitter’s brand right now and obtained a response: “Relating to your query on the Twitter X brand, we are able to affirm that while it’s comparable, this isn’t the capital X glyph from Monotype’s ‘Particular Alphabets 4,'” mentioned Phil Garnham, govt artistic director at Monotype. We requested Monotype to make clear whether or not the Twitter brand is the lower-case x from Particular Alphabets 4 and can replace this text if we get a solution.
Creator of Twitter hen reminisces
Twitter’s hen icon debuted over a decade in the past after significantly extra forethought. It was designed in 2012 by three individuals, together with Martin Grasser, who wrote a thread reminiscing on the creation of the emblem.
“The emblem was designed to be easy, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, virtually like a lowercase ‘e,'” he wrote. Twitter’s solely instruction to the design staff was, “we would like a brand new hen, and it ought to be nearly as good because the Apple and Nike brand,” in line with Grasser.
Grasser began by drawing birds, and one of many sketches ultimately morphed into the well-known blue brand after the staff “spent our time perfecting each little element… in order that it felt balanced, and visual as a hen on the smallest of sizes. Someday in March we had an accepted hen and it launched in Might of 2012. This little blue hen did a lot over the past 11 years,” Grasser wrote.
X shall be all the pieces
To mark the emblem change, Musk posted a collection of X-related tweets (or X-related Xs), together with one picture of the Twitter headquarters with a big X projected on the facet of the constructing. Whereas the Twitter.com area nonetheless exists, Musk reportedly informed Twitter workers “that he’d simply despatched them the final e-mail he’d ever ship from a Twitter e-mail deal with.”
Consistent with Musk’s purpose of constructing an “all the pieces app,” not too long ago employed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote yesterday that “X is the longer term state of limitless interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, funds/banking—creating a world market for concepts, items, providers, and alternatives. Powered by AI, X will join us all in methods we’re simply starting to think about.”
