Twitter has officially traded its iconic blue bird logo for a black-and-white “X,” marking the latest change to the social media platform since Elon Musk purchased it last year.
Musk announced the rebrand Sunday, changing his profile to the X and posting promotional videos of the new logo. He also posted a photo Monday of the new logo being projected onto Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
“[S]oon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted Sunday.
The X began to appear on the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird remained the prominent logo on the mobile version.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino also promoted the new logo Monday, tweeting that “X is here! Let’s do this.”
She also said the new logo represents “the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
Graphic designer Martin Grasser, who was part of the team that designed Twitter’s widely recognized, longtime logo, posted a series of tweets Sunday explaining how the blue bird came to be. He said his instructions were that “it should be as good as” the Apple and Nike logos.
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“Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird,” he tweeted. “This logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three. @toddwaterbury, @angyche and myself…The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase ‘e’.”
“Sometime in March we had an approved bird and it launched in May of 2012,” he added. “This little blue bird did so much over the last 11 years.”
The latest update is likely just the first step in Musk fully rebranding Twitter to X, a move that experts say will probably confuse existing users. Musk said that the X.com web domain now redirects to Twitter.com and that tweets will be called Xs in the future.
Musk is also the CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is commonly known as SpaceX. And he uses “X” as a nickname for his son, whose legal name is a series of letters and symbols.
The Associated Press contributed.