X now marks the spot where Twitter’s blue birdie used to be, as Elon Musk rebranded the social media company he owns. Those tweeting — or X-ing (?) — about it seem mostly confused and unimpressed at best.
For many, the simple letter logo is coming across as uninspired, as tweets ripped Musk and the company for either employing a grade schooler or spending less than 10 minutes to ditch and redesign a logo used for years and recognized around the world.
Others found similarities in X branding and usage elsewhere on the web.
Musk’s X appears to be the same as that used for the X Window System, “a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems,” as Wikipedia puts it. That system has nothing to do with Microsoft Windows, by the way. But Tom Warren at The Verge tweeted that those rip-off comparisons fail to recognize that Musk’s X is just the X glyph from Unicode’s Special Alphabets 4.
Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino both tweeted about the shift to X, and the replies and re-X’s or whatever they’re called now, lived up to old Twitter’s brand of social commentary.
The Xbox News account and others got in on the action looking to compare the X to that used by Microsoft’s video games division.
Another user gathered up the X logos used for Microsoft Excel over the years.
And others with a love for the bird looked for ways to appeal to Musk and his marketers to bring back that logo, even if it had to incorporate an X in a redesign.