Twitter

On 23 July 2023 Elon Musk said Twitter would become X. The next day the bird was gone from the app. That is the whole launch sequence. No overlap period, no attempt to carry the old silhouette into the new one, no year of the bird shrinking beside a new word. A heavy geometric X landed in the same slot, and the company that had spent a decade teaching the world a cyan bird asked everyone to learn a letter instead.

People called the product the bird. That is a rare achievement for a logo. Most marks hope to be recognised. Twitter’s 2012 bird was a name.

A silhouette that already meant lift

The 2012 bird, sometimes called Larry, was a single pose: up and right, a bit of lift, no legs, no eye. It worked at sixteen pixels. It worked in cyan. It worked as a verb. To tweet was already a stretch as language; the picture made the stretch feel inevitable. You could spot it on a crowded phone screen without reading the word Twitter, which is the test a social app actually has to pass.

An X is also a close button, a delete, a strike-through, a rating, a former, a kiss, a wrong answer. Fine meanings on their own. Together they mean this mark has to fight every other X on the screen, including the ones in its own interface. The bird never had that fight. Nothing else on a timeline was a small cyan bird facing east.

The replacement was not trying to win that fight. Musk had talked about X as a wider everything-app for years. The logo change was a company change announced as a drawing. Whether you think the company needed renaming is a separate argument. As a logo, the X has to do work the bird already did, in a shape that several other products already own.

The bird did not come back

Unlike Gap, nobody put it back. Unlike HBO Max, there was no later admission that the short name had given away the only distinctive word. The X is still there. The word Twitter is still what a lot of people say, which is its own kind of verdict. A rebrand that cannot get the old name out of the mouth has not finished.

Jaguar later parked a leaping cat for a fashion wordmark and ran a film with no cars in it. Twitter did the more violent version of that idea: take the animal off overnight, leave a letter, keep shipping. Both decisions treat a silhouette as baggage. Silhouettes are the opposite of baggage. They are how a mark travels when the name is too small to read.

A bird facing up and right told you the product was a place things go. An X tells you something got cancelled. Those are different jobs. Only one of them needed doing on a social network.

• Company announcements and app icon, 23–24 July 2023