blue bird no more: twitter becomes X as elon musk introduces rebranded tweeting platform

Bye bye blue bird and hello black-and-white birdie

It seems that Elon Musk enjoys rebranding more than anyone. His most recent stunt surprised Twitter fans and devotees as he changed the iconic blue bird into a monochromatic, edgy, and minimalist letter X on July 13th, 2023. Not only has the logo changed, but Elon Musk and his team are implying that the platform itself will be revamped too. Twitter, founded in 2006, will transition to become and be called X. It alludes to his favorite letter in the alphabet – so much that even his space exploration corporation has an X in the title – and in fact tweeted about it on the day of the black-and-white X reveal. ‘Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X,’ the tweet states.

Artist Martin Grasser, one of the designers of the original flying blue bird logo of Twitter alongside Target chief creative officer Todd Waterbury and artist Angy Che, takes his time to say goodbye to one of the most recognizable logos in a series of tweets. The thread has Grasser looking back to how the trio designed and redesigned the blue bird logo for Twitter, letting the public peek through the at-times arduous process of design. He posted images to testify to the rigorous tweaking that took place before the soaring blue bird came to fruition. Years after it was established, he has come to close this chapter in his book. ‘Sometime in March we had an approved bird and it launched in May of 2012. This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years,’ one of his tweets says.

image by Twitter

X, twitter’s rebranded platform, is powered by AI

Aside from Elon Musk, X’s Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino joyously welcomes the rebranding of Twitter. It is her tweet that can confirm the new platform that is X, a couple of weeks after Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his Threads app, a dubbed Twitter rival. ‘It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square,’ she says in a tweet. She adds that X will be the future of ‘unlimited interactivity’ focusing on audio, video, messaging, payments and banking, and creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

More than these, X will be powered by artificial intelligence, Elon Musk’s seemingly favorite tech medium. For a quick recap of his other endeavors, he is going to use AI too for his brain-reading device which has now been approved to be implanted into people for testing. His Tesla vehicles are also powered by the ever-transmuting technology and algorithm, not to mention the robot arms working in his Giga Factories across the globe. A humanoid robot aka Tesla Bot that may be underway is also expected to embrace artificial intelligence at the core of its system. Elon Musk and his fascination with AI is not a secret. How he and his X team are going to use it on the rebranded platform might still be a question soon to be answered.

X, Twitter’s rebranded platform | image by Elon Musk, via Twitter

No more blue verified logo too?

Not even the verified check logo influencers and established personalities aim for has escaped the rebranding. The X-verified logo has also appeared beside Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino’s check sign, a hint at the transition that it is going through. It is likely that those who have earned and purchased the Twitter verification will receive X’s black-and-white logo and alphabet to be in line with the new rebranding. Changing traditions and iconography appears to be a path that Elon Musk likes to tread, given that just in April 2023, he changed Twitter’s logo into a Shiba Inu dog. It mirrored the logo of the spoof cryptocurrency platform Dogecoin but did not last in replacing the blue bird.

Looking at the new Twitter logo, the futuristic bird seems to go from flying high in the sky to downward crashing or landing. Its geometric body is bigger than its stick-like wings, not so weightless that it drags its own body down. The black-and-white color palette for X may also be the result of the quick poll that Elon Musk called on his followers on the day of the logo reveal. He asked if Twitter’s – or should it be X from now on – default system and platform color should be changed to black. Out of 1,881,083 users and bots who voted, 74.8 percent of them gave a thumbs up to the black palette. Soon, X may change the color scheme of its platform to the winning color, a favorite shade as seen used in the other projects and companies he established, and its platform, powered by AI, is expected to see changes.

Elon Musk posted Twitter’s HQ on the night of X’s reveal | image by Elon Musk, via Twitter