Twitter’s Rebranding: From the Blue Bird to the Enigmatic ‘𝕏’
Early on Monday morning, Twitter initiated a partial rebranding by replacing its iconic blue bird logo with a fan-made “𝕏” logo.
Twitter’s homepage carries the same X symbol, used as a profile picture for its official @twitter account, and displayed on a splash screen during website loading.
Elon Musk announced this haphazard rebranding.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
He hinted at the eventual phase-out of the Twitter brand and all bird-related imagery.
The current blue bird logo, designed by Martin Grasser, Todd Waterbury, and Angy Che, was actually Twitter’s second logo. Twitter had “Larry the Bird” as its logo from 2010 to 2012.
We liked using a circles to construct our drawings, it felt like the bird should have an underlying neutrality and simplicity about it pic.twitter.com/ir1apIsVf5
— martin grasser (@martingrasser) July 24, 2023
The final design of the Twitter bird logo featured 15 overlaid circles, chosen for its legibility and the symbolism of democratizing information and amplifying voices. The logo became inseparable from the language of the platform. “Tweets” refer to posts and “the bird app” is the app itself.
The new interim X logo, introduced by Musk, has received mixed reviews, with many finding it generic and lacking distinctiveness.
Musk himself described it as an interim design. The logo bears a striking resemblance to the Unicode character “Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X” (U+1D54F, “𝕏”), allowing Musk to tweet the logo using just text.
While the rebranding effort is ongoing, the original blue bird logo still remains in use on Twitter’s favicon and mobile apps. However, with Musk’s announcement, it seems that Twitter is on the path to an evolving visual identity.