The Twitter rebrand from a recognisable blue bird to a generic X is happening in real time in full view of, well, everyone. Usually rebrands take months, if not years. They happen behind closed doors and are cooked until ready, but Elon Musk is making tweaks to the X logo in public on a whim as the urge takes him. It's like branding doesn't matter anymore.
Following the controversial removal of the little blue bird in favour of an X logo, causing designers to roast the Twitter rebrand, it seems Musk wasn't satisfied. He momentarily changed the X logo, perhaps after someone pointed out that it already existed as a Unicode character. The new X design was similar but had slightly thicker lines. But within hours Musk had decided he didn't like how it looked so he had it changed back again.
Musk wrote on Twitter: "I don’t like the thicker bars, so reverting." Adding: "The logo will evolve over time." The secrecy of normal logo design and rebranding has been jettisoned as Musk is happy to have the errors, mistakes and confusion of rebranding laid bare on social media. It's refreshing but also wildly odd behaviour if you've ever been a part of a rebrand. If he really going to test out every potential logo design by putting it live on the platform to see how it looks? Has he not heard of mockups?
Musk appears to be playing with his $44 billion social media toy. The X logo was crowdsourced in a couple of hours on Sunday when Musk tweeted that if anyone could give him a "good enough" logo, he would make it live the next day.
The X logo has been derided by designers for its resemblance to Monotype's Special Alphabets 4 font, and the rollout of the X branding has been haphazard: it's rolled out on desktop versions of Twitter but the old blue bird remains on mobile app (as I write).
Musk has stated before that the current X logo is still an "interim" design, suggesting we may see more changes. Musk prides himself on being a disruptor, and he's certainly changing the way we're used to rebrands taking place. Below are some more X logos designed by Musk and Twitter's community, maybe one of these will become the real thing?
