Twitter's Switch to X Called 'Brand Suicide'

Twitter is getting rid of its bird logo as part of its rebrand to X, and designer Martin Grasser is saying a fond farewell. "Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird," Grasser tweeted Monday, describing how he created the logo with co-designers Angy Che and Todd Waterbury in 2012. He said then-CEO Jack Dorsey wanted something simpler and more iconic than the "flying goose" in use at the time. He says he started out with sketches of birds and the team used circles to construct their drawings "because it felt it felt like the bird should have an underlying neutrality and simplicity about it." The Verge, describing Elon Musk's rebranding effort as "haphazard," reports that the "interim" X logo now in use is "so generic" that it "appears almost identical to the Unicode character Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X." More:

• The bird's evolution. Ryan Lau at Logo.com looks at the evolution of the Twitter bird over the years, starting with the logo in a "slimy" green color used while the app was being developed. He notes that the bird was originally called Larry, after the basketball player, but it became simply "the Twitter bird" with the 2012 redesign.

• "Brand suicide." Jenn Takahashi, founder of Takahashi PR, is one of the many critics of the rebranding effort. "It's brand suicide," she tells Fast Company. "It will probably be the dumbest thing he's done since taking over, and considering everything he's done over the past few months, that's saying a lot," she says of Musk.
• Why the change? The New York Times reports that amid Twitter's financial struggles, Musk has been increasingly stressing the importance of turning it into an "everything app" similar to WeChat in China. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said Sunday that X would be the "future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking." But with user numbers falling, "it's not clear how much runway Mr. Musk has to get a reborn X airborne."
• "A very selfish decision." Hannah Thoreson, who has used Twitter for work and personal posts since 2009, tells the AP that she considers the decision "very selfish," since there are "so many small businesses and so many nonprofits and so many government agencies and things like that all around the world that have relied on Twitter for many years to push their message and reach people. And they all have the Twitter icon on everything from their website to their business cards."

• A long fascination with X. The New York Times notes that Musk has long been fascinated with the letter X—he founded online bank X.com in 1999, which merged with another startup to become PayPal. He bought the domain back from Paypal in 2017. The Times reports that inside company headquarters, conference rooms were renamed "to words with X in them, including 'eXposure,' 'eXult,' and 's3Xy.'"
• A "very loud debut." Guardian technology editor Dan Milmo notes that while Sunday's change felt rushed, the X project has been in the works for a long time. "And such has been the resulting splash, the X brand has at least made a loud debut," he writes.
• People might keep calling it Twitter. Musk has said people should start calling tweets Xs, but it's not clear whether the new name for the posts, or the app, will catch on. "Just as every mention of Alphabet still says Google, and every mention of Meta still says Facebook, every mention of X will still say Twitter until both are irrelevant," Anil Dash at the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells Fast Company.

(More Twitter stories.)