What does Twitter's new logo really represent?
- Reference: 1690379950
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/26/twitters_new_logo_meaning/
- Source link:
As [1]The Reg reported earlier this week , Twitter has a new logo. The blue bird logo the site has used since 2012 is no more, but we found its co-creator Martin Grasser's [2]thread about how they designed it fascinating. We learned that it was constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles.
The new logo, though, isn't just any old X; it's a double-struck capital 𝕏. Although the character can be found in several specialized fonts, such as Monotype [3]Special Alphabet 4 , it's also a Unicode character, at code point [4]U+1D54F (if your hexadecimal is rusty, we make that 120143 in decimal).
[5]
There is a [6]whole set of double-struck characters in Unicode 3.1. Double-stroke letters, or blackboard bold as they're sometimes called, have specific [7]meanings in mathematics, some of them to do with set theory. The double-struck capital X is sometimes used to denote an arbitrary metric space, for [8]example .
Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux [9]READ MORE
Those familiar with the logo of [10]X.org , the custodians of the [11]soon to be 40-year-old X window system , may also find the design, with a thin ascending stroke but wide descending one, to be rather familiar – although that logo is already inadequately [12]defended as it is.
[13]Mr Musk's X.com was [14]one of the companies that ended up as part of PayPal, and back in 2010 [15]we were reporting on PayPal using the domain . There is a good brief [16]history of the deal on Twitter, along with [17]another of the incident that led to the destruction of Mr Musk's [18]Mclaren F1 supercar . A number of famous people have crashed these brutally rapid – and brutally expensive – vehicles, including [19]actor Rowan Atkinson and [20]Micromuse co-founder Chris Dawe , who sadly did not survive the experience.
[21]Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365
[22]Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel
[23]McAfee's and FireEye rename themselves 'Trellix'
[24]Bless you: Yep, it's IBM's new name for tech services spinoff and totally not a hayfever medicine
As boffin's boffin Ken Shirriff [25]describes , the stylized double-struck X was added to Unicode in 2001 – just after the merger of the original X.com and Paypal. This particular form of the symbol was already being [26]used by Indian electronic musician [27]Kxlider , although as he has [28]noted , as a Unicode character, it can't be trademarked or otherwise protected.
The letter X in general, though, is also a registered trademark of multiple companies, including both [29]Microsoft since 2003, in the context of its Xbox video games console, and [30]Meta since 2019, in the context of social networks. Reuters [31]reports that there are some 900 other claims. ®
Get our [32]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/twitter_brand/
[2] https://twitter.com/martingrasser/status/1683266038602010624
[3] https://catalog.monotype.com/font/monotype/special-alphabets/4
[4] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZMFDJdYGgcmfJPiZb-ZiNgAAAxM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/double-struck.html
[7] https://onlinemathcenter.com/blog/math/math-symbols-and-their-meanings-part-vi-blackboard-bold/
[8] https://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/georgakopoulos/ltop/ltop.pdf
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/13/wayland_is_coming/
[10] https://www.x.org/wiki/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/22/the_x_window_system_just/
[12] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/wibssl/i_found_the_xorg_logo_on_a_local_caf%C3%A9/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/16/elon_musk_biography_interview_ashlee_vance/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/23/paypal_platform_x/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2010/02/24/paypal_x_developer_contest/
[16] https://twitter.com/garius/status/1683808576328937472
[17] https://twitter.com/garius/status/1683511457399308289
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/gdm_plans_e_car/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2011/08/05/atkinson_prang/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/1999/03/22/micromuse_founder_killed_in_f1/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/microsoft_365_rebrand/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/16/intel_pentium_celeron_processor/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/trellix_mcafee_fireye_logowatch/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/12/ibm_kyndryl/
[25] https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1683574648926097408
[26] https://twitter.com/kxlider/status/1683436498006478848
[27] https://indiefy.me/kxlider
[28] https://twitter.com/kxlider/status/1683473817862127617
[29] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2693757
[30] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=8798083
[31] https://www.reuters.com/technology/problem-with-x-meta-microsoft-hundreds-more-own-trademarks-new-twitter-name-2023-07-25/
[32] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Didn't Microsoft use a similar stylizing for the "X" in the Excel icon once upon a time? Like maybe the OS X v.X version or 2004?
In the early days, it was a blocky grey L lying flat, with a diagonal blue bar on top of it to make a sort of X.
In Excel 95, the L became a darker blue and the whole thing was more upgright.
Then it changed to green in Excel 2000.
In 2010, the base of the L became a lot shorter, and in 2013 it disappeared altogether.
The Mac logo was much the same untel Excel 2001 when it became 3 stylised drops of green water in the shape of an X. Those became flatter and more matte through to 2008.
In 2011, it was two bent green lines forming the top and bottom of the X, and in 2016 it returned to being the same as the Windows version.
LOL, how/why do you know this? Virtual pint for random facts =------>
An X Man
Now Musk is one of the X Men.
Re: An X Man
"Now Musk is one of the X Men"
So what are you suggesting his superpower is...narcissism or ego?
Re: An X Man
Ego, surely, making him Powerpuff(ed up) Man.
Re: An X Man
The Powerpuff man. I like that. Imagine Elon's fact on the Staypuft Marshmallow Man - that's where we're going?
Rebranding Fail
There's a nice thread on "X" or maybe it was a TikTok from a rebranding specialist pointing out that just sticking an "X" logo on your web site without retiring/replacing all the rest is about as shoddy as you can get (no surprise from Mr Musk) So Tweet/Twitter is still all through the interface and on the Apple App (and Play Store App) etc.
Re: Rebranding Fail
What, you mean "Wormhole X-treme" wasn't just the best name ever?
What about the ITV rebrand?
Their not available to PS owners streaming service is now ITV small blue bird.
As I told them, save watching their crap.
Re: What about the ITV rebrand?
What's that you say?
"The letter X in general, though, is also a registered trademark of multiple companies, including both Microsoft since 2003, in the context of its Xbox video games console, and Meta since 2019, in the context of social networks"
If Meta owns a trademark on X in the context of Social networks, surely then Twitter rebanding to X is going to infringe their trademark? As Twitter is definitely a social network.
Nah they can just claim (justifiably and with plenty of evidence) that they are indeed an "Anti-social Network".
Let's hope it stops the hate comments
I for one hope it stops the "hate" ( I'll use the wokesters favourite word here) comments that have become so prevalent with anything to do with Musk..
I don't care about Twitter etc but I do care about the level of comments en El Reg. It's become just another echo chamber for those that have no actual opinions on the subject at hand but rather a place where they spout out some nonsense about a man that they do not know, will probably never meet, and if they did they most certainly would not have the courage to use their infantile remarks to his face.
How about we get back to actually making constructive comments rather the childish ideological nonsense.
Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments
"Let's hope it stops the hate comments"
I hear you're a racist now, Father? Should we all be racist now? What's the Church's position? I'm so busy down on the farm I won't have much time for the ol' racism.
Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments
I for one would be happy to tell Musk what I think of him to his face. He's an insecure bully, who fakes technical knowledge but compensates by throwing money at people who are much smarter than he is. The companies that he has bought into that are sucessful appear to be successful because they don't let him interfere with the core development work as much as he'd clearly like to. He's an incredible negotiator, financially smart and brilliant at marketing, but the public image of technical genius is largely hype.
None of that is ideological. I don't care about his politics, or his wealth - but I do follow the news closely, because the large tech companies that include Musk's are directly impacting the world around us - it's natural to follow both the positive and negative aspects of those changes, and the behaviour of the people behind them. In the case of 'X', this also gives us some interesting ideas about what he plans to do with the company in future.
Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments
Oh, you want constructive feedback?
Musk is a trust fund clown who has no formal engineering chops, but made a lot of money from his PayPal shares - which they didn't take from him when they sacked him for incompetence.
Since then he has ploughed that money into tech adjacent companies, which got him some kudos, but by all accounts at those companies there were entire teams set up to manage him - to stop his bad ideas from being actioned, and to make his less bad but still silly, unworkable ideas, into something useful.
For example, I won't pretend that SpaceX landing boosters isn't wildly impressive, but he didn't engineer that - and it wasn't even a new idea - he just paid people to make it happen out of his functionally infinite money supply that wasn't tied up in civil service/govt red tape. He just said "make thunderbird one", and threw money at the problem. It was the money and talented engineers with a free hand who made it actually happen.
At Twitter, he has no management team to contain him, and we're seeing him raw and unedited. And that raw, unedited Musk is a rampant right wing bigot with serious fascistic leanings who has no idea how to run a company and barely any idea how to communicate publicly, berates people below him with no concept of what he's doing in the process (See the special member of staff on the 'do not fire' list who he fired, and who almost cost him tens of millions of dollars on the spot, because he didn't pay attention to the massive warnings on the HR file....), and demonstrably has no idea how to run a business.
The reason there is hate for him is because had he not had his PayPal shares, he's just be another trust fund loser causing problems for a small amount of people, instead of right now where he has already caused major problems for thousands of people through his actions at Twitter directly, and with his ludicrous mismanagement of the platform, he's risking the livelihoods of tens of thousands of more who used Twitter for marketing, comms and research.
For the rest of us, we're laughing at him for demonstrating that no, billionaires are not special - it's entirely possible to become rich while being dumb and lucky, and that's exactly why they shouldn't be worshiped or put on a pedastal.
If you want go drink Musks piss, that's fine, but don't for a moment pretend that it's out of some egalitarian desire for 'constructive criticism' - if you knew of Musks history, as many of us here do, then you'd know that the negative feelings towards him are entirely justified and watching him crash and burn publicly is hilarious.
Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments
"If you want go drink Musks piss, that's fine, but don't for a moment pretend that it's out of some egalitarian desire for 'constructive criticism' - if you knew of Musks history, as many of us here do, then you'd know that the negative feelings towards him are entirely justified and watching him crash and burn publicly is hilarious.""
This is a perfect example of what I commented about... It's truly sad.
Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments
This comment thread sums up the new El Reg perfectly.
Can we frame it?
Nice try though.
an arbitrary metric space
So it's all the fault of the French?
X marks the spot
Where you can find your xit[1]
Don't do that or it'll never get better.
[1] pronounced "zit", proposed usage instead of "tweet"
Re: X marks the spot
Cap'n Blowhard ahoy!
Reading too fast leads to mis-attribution
> We learned that it was constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles.
When I read that I first thought that it was referring to the new X logo and was glad to realise the truth.
What is worrying is that the idea of a Design Boutique coming up with an X and claiming that it was "constructed like a geometrical diagram, from 15 overlapping circles" sounded so believable in my head!
Guess I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing joss sticks.
X-citing!
Yawn.
How to destroy even more brand value - get a new logo totally unrelated to the company, service and brand!