The world’s richest person and owner of several companies from Tech, AI, and automotive to space exploration Elon Musk ran a competition on Twitter for rebranding its identity. This competition involved submitting the new Twitter logo ‘X’.
Musk received hundreds and probably thousands of submissions on his Twitter profile. Of course, most were trash, memes, and plain ugly.
But at the end of the day, Elon Musk finalized the new ‘X’ logo. Now the new X logo has replaced the bird logo on the Twitter.com website. I opened and closed the Twitter app on my Android phone multiple times but the logo hasn’t been replaced there yet (most probably it will once the Twitter app is updated to the next version).
Just a few hours ago (as of this writing), the new Twitter logo X was projected on the company’s HQ building in San Francisco. Both the owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted photos of this event on their official profiles.
Before acquiring the social media giant Twitter last year and taking it private, Elon Musk hinted that it’s just the beginning of ‘X’, the everything app.
In the last 9 months, Elon Musk and his renewed software team at Twitter have added more features to the Twitter app than were introduced in the last 5 years. For example, the addition of long tweets for blue check-marked accounts, video navigation on up/down swipe, and the recently added Communities feature — the answer to Facebook Groups.
The Origin Story of the ‘Twitter X’ Logo
The origin of X dates as far back as when Elon Musk launched x.com — an online payments platform that later on merged into PayPal.
Elon Musk re-acquired the x.com domain in 2017. Since then, he seems to be infatuated with the letter X. He formed the X Holdings Corp last year as an umbrella corporation for his companies last year.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Musk launched an artificial intelligence company named xAI as well. Now, Twitter has become X.
Elon Musk has also announced on Twitter that X.com is now pointing to Twitter.com.
Yesterday when Elon Musk asked for X logo submissions, Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt submitted the log we see in the above tweet. He also posted a short animated video of the logo as well.
This eventually caught Elon Musk’s eye and it was selected to become Twitter’s X. However, Sawyer later told the story of how this logo was made.
Twitter user Alex (@ajtourville) provided a thicker (bold) version of this X logo a while ago to Sawyer Merritt for one of his podcasts. But since this podcast has been discontinued, Alex offered the X logo free to use for Elon Musk.
Turns out it’s just the letter X from a font that Alex found online. The font from which the Twitter X logo is extracted is “Special Alphabets 4”.
The font Special Alphabets 4 is available online for 30 USD but the scale at which Twitter is using it might raise copyright concerns. But Musk can easily afford to settle a copyright claim, so that should not be a big concern on the part of Twitter.
Font-related Twitter account Fontendou found the font used in the X logo of Twitter. Interestingly, the thicker version of the X is in the upper-case letters, and the thinner version is found in the lower-case letters of the Special Alphabets 4 font.
Under Elon Musk’s vision and Linda Yaccarino’s leadership, these moves can either make or break what we used to know as Twitter, now it is ‘X’. Personally, I did not like the rebranding of the Twitter log from the cute little bird to this X. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
I am running a poll on Twitter if this is another media troll attempt by Elon Musk and his Twitter team and the blue bird logo will return. Add your answers to the following poll on your opinion about this.
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