The X.com "Rebrand" Is So Bad It's Laughable

Maybe laughing is an unwise reaction though. Is something more nefarious (i.e. manipulative) going on here?

I was doing some research for an article I’m writing this week and had to visit Twitter to look something up. I haven’t been on there since I quit last month. I had heard rumblings online that it was rebranded as “X”, but I didn’t bother to check on it because, well, I don’t like to look backwards. It’s like breaking up with a boyfriend. I very rarely look them up after the fact.

Visiting Twitter today was like stumbling upon an ex’s profile. Only it’s an ex that’s gotten really fat since the last time you saw them. You kind of want to feel bad for them, but you also can’t help but laugh. And keep laughing as you think about it throughout the day.

So basically Elon & Co. swapped out the Twitter bird for an “X” that looks like it was made in Paint. Cool beans.

I went looking for the new style guide to see what other branded changes I might have missed.

This page is not what we expect to see from a corporate style guide. This is nothing more than a page to announce the new logo design and a way to provide media outlets and others with an official logo they can download. No color palette. No font guidelines. No company mission, vision, or values statements. No visual identity explainer. None of it.

What you see above in the screenshot is literally it. It’s an ugly-ass logo that anyone in their right mind and with any business savvy should be embarrassed to have made or put their stamp of approval on.

So just to sum up:

• The domain name is still twitter.com.

• The old blue and black brand colors are still in place.

• The grunge-inspired text styling from the last Twitter update is there too.

• The “X” logo is the only change and it’s fucking idiotic.

I wrote about the Twitter grunge rebranding fail last year because it was really bad. Not because it was necessarily ugly, but because it caused serious eye strain and accessibility issues for users.

But I’ll give Twitter this: At least when they committed to a rebrand, they went full steam ahead with it. And when they were challenged on their poor design choices, they committed to them.

What the Hell Was Musk Thinking?

I’ve been teaching businesses and web designers how to create winning digital presences for 10+ years. One of the topics I occasionally cover is how to properly rebrand a website.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in rebranding is to only partially rebrand your digital property, be it a website or app. Especially if it’s a well-known digital entity.

For one, it causes a shit ton of confusion in your users. Is this still Twitter? Or is it X? What do we call it now and how do we refer to it?

What a pain this must be for marketers trying to explain to clients why they need to be marketing their businesses on Twitter/X. The digital platform can’t even get its own identity straight. How is it going to help other businesses strengthen and optimize their own via social media marketing?

It also makes the team behind the platform and rebranding look super sloppy and amateurish. Like why couldn’t they just do the whole thing at once? Are they even planning to rebrand the whole thing? Or are we stuck in this weird limbo where they want to leverage the power of a name like Twitter while only changing the visual identifier of the site on us?

Plus, what happens now with the old Twitter lingo? Do users no longer tweet or retweet? Are they X’ing and re-X’ing?

What a mess.

This clearly wasn’t thought through very well. My guess is that Musk wanted to get the ball rolling on transforming Twitter into a WeChat-style everything app. So he pushed his team to start pushing out whatever parts of the rebrand were ready. Namely, the logo that someone likely threw together in five minutes using Canva.

(There might be a more nefarious reason why the new logo was the only thing pushed out. I’ll explain more down below.)

I know that Twitter users won’t care how silly the logo is or how confusing this rebrand will make things.

Elon Musk stans will stand by their man no matter how shitty or duplicitous he acts or how poorly executed his ideas are. And if they can’t explain away his stupidity, they can always say, “Well, he’s got ‘fuck off’ money and is free to do whatever he wants.”

But is he really?

Say what you will about the censorship that arose over the last few years, but Twitter was a goliath in the social media space. Even if we hated the preferential treatment that progressives got, the censorship of common sense, and the inane rise of “fact checkers”, Twitter was somewhere we could go to find other people like ourselves. It really was our public square.

While it slowly became an inhospitable and exclusive public square these past few years, it feels like Musk is intentionally destroying what’s left of its credibility and reliability. And I think it’s intentional.

Final Thoughts

I made a prediction a year ago about Twitter being rebranded as X.com. That transformation has begun. Now I’m going to make piggyback on top of that prediction:

I think Musk is going to talk more and more about how awful the code is on the backend of Twitter, how difficult the platform is to wrangle, and how there’s just too much legacy branding to deal with. He’s going to get everyone riled up about it.

He’s also going to make them think that it’s bad code or old employees who are responsible for the account bannings, content restrictions, and all the shitty stuff that still goes on there. He might even throw his marketing or design team under the bus if he gets enough criticism about the logo.

Then he’s going to propose that twitter.com be scrapped altogether. He’s going to announce that the new X.com website and app will be launched soon to replace it.

“Don’t worry, guys. It’s the same X you’ve come to know and recognize this past year. We’re just going to make it 1,000 times better and without all that old Twitter-y stuff in it.”

He’ll give “influencers” early access to the app and get them talking about how amazing it is and sharing Musk-sanctioned screenshots from it. They’re not going to focus on the typical Twitter features though. Their talking points will revolve around all the WeChat-like features that X.com has.

“Oh my god, it’s like totally next-level! I can do everything with this app, not like that old stupid Twitter. I won’t ever need to install another app on my phone again! Heil X.com!”

We’ll see all this roll out over the next year or so. Maybe even sooner.

The reason I think this is how it’ll play out is because of that damn “X” logo. It is the lamest rebrand I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. There’s no way they spent any money to make it.

I have a feeling all the funds that Twitter generates from blue checks, sponsored content, and subscriptions are going into app development. And the reason why they swapped out the Twitter bird for the X was to condition users. When they see the black “X” — even if the domain and everything else is unchanged — they automatically think of this platform.

So yeah, that’s my prediction.

I really don’t want to pay attention to Twitter/X. I really don’t. I know that bad things are coming down the pipeline and I want to be as far away from that app as I can. And I’ve done a good job of staying away this last month post-breakup. Yet seeing that “rebrand” today got me all riled up again.

In closing what I’ll say is this: A man with as huge of an ego as Elon Musk would never approve of a logo like the one created for X. That is, unless he knows he can use its bad design to his advantage somehow.

You don’t need a keen design eye or marketing savvy to realize it’s an awful design. So if you haven’t given it any thought yet, head over to twitter.com and take a really good look at it. Why would someone allow an app they paid $44 billion for be branded with that nonsense?