Elon Musk has once again made headlines by rebranding Twitter’s iconic flying blue bird logo to a monochromatic letter X. It is signifying a transformation of the entire social media platform now called X. The minimalist, edgy new logo imply that major structural changes lay beyond just cosmetic redesigns for the social media site.
Martin Grasser, one of the designers of Twitter’s original soaring blue bird logo, reflected on that creative process in a Twitter thread after the logo had flown freely for 11 years. Grasser posted photos showing the numerous iterations the design team went through before finalizing the simple yet distinctive design of the blue flying bird.
Now, he bids farewell to the logo that did so much over the past decade. “After some tweaking in March 2012, we had an approved bird and it launched in May of that year. This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years,” Grasser tweeted.
The new CEO of rebranded platform X, Linda Yaccarino, enthusiastically welcomed the rebranding. In a tweet, she said X will transform global communication through innovations in audio, video, payments, banking, and a global AI-powered marketplace.
Yaccarino stated that X will provide “unlimited interactivity”, going beyond what Twitter achieved in changing how the world communicates.
Musk’s online poll and the new logo
Elon Musk’s passion for AI as a key technology is well documented as he employs it throughout his companies like Tesla, factories and his planned humanoid robot. Yet how exactly he plans to leverage AI within X remains unclear.
The new minimalist X logo, depicting the bird landing instead of flying, resulted from Musk’s online poll in which most voters preferred the black and white color scheme over blue. X’s AI-powered platform will likely see significant changes beyond aesthetics, in line with Yaccarino’s vision of transforming global communication through AI-driven innovation.
X users’ reactions
While the X logo was projected onto Twitter’s headquarters signifying a new era, users – now called “X users” – have mixed reactions. Many joke that the X conjures thoughts of porn while others find it generic.
Generally, logo changes initially meet resistance. Only time will tell if users embrace the X logo or it becomes another rebranding experiment. For now, the reactions showcase the hurdles Musk faces in remolding Twitter into his vision of X, a global app powered by AI. The ambitious scope of his plan remains to be seen.