The rebranding train has come to an finish and for all intents and functions, Twitter is now X. A part of firm proprietor Elon Musk’s grander imaginative and prescient of making a brilliant app, X is now right here to create its personal identification, and all of it was carried out in a mere three-day interval. There’s one little query many are questioning. Rebranding an organization as massive as Twitter often takes weeks if not months. So, was Musk dashing issues and slicing corners together with his haphazard emblem change? A brand new report has highlighted some irregularities across the new emblem and has raised the query about whether or not the corporate may even use it.
In response to a report by The Verge, the primary a part of the issue comes from the supply behind the design of the emblem itself. The stylized X, on the finish of the day, is simply two angular strains intersecting one another. However it seems that it wasn’t designed from scratch. Whereas the Twitter consumer, Sawyer Merritt, who let Musk use the emblem, has maintained that the inspiration behind the emblem got here from a font the designer discovered on-line, the designer himself contradicts the data.
In a tweet, the designer of the emblem, Alex, tweeted the story behind the emblem and defined that it was primarily based on a Unicode character. The Unicode character in query is U+1D54F, which has existed since 2001, and it resembles the present Twitter emblem fairly carefully. However fortunately for Musk, the characters submitted to Unicode Normal are launched below the Unicode Licence which is free and open-source for anybody to make use of with out restrictions.
However The Verge has discovered one other origin for the brand new emblem, which makes issues extra sophisticated. In response to the report, the X from the emblem seems to be similar to the lowercase X from Monotype’s Particular Alphabet 4. Whereas Monotype has not issued any assertion relating to this, if the 2 logos match, Musk should buy a license with the intention to use it.
The trademark difficulty with X
There’s yet one more downside with the X emblem, and this goes past the design. An organization emblem can be a part of its trademark, and defending a trademark that could be a single letter of the alphabet could be insanely difficult. A report by Quick Firm acknowledged, “Single letters are among the many hottest logos registered within the United States. Every letter of the alphabet has, at a minimal, a whole bunch of logos”.
And in case you are confused as to how can there be a number of logos for a similar letter, the reply is straightforward. Emblems exist to assist customers distinguish items and providers from one supply to a different. “A trademark does not have to be significantly distinctive to be protectable, so long as the proprietor can present that folks affiliate the mark with the model,” Alexandra Roberts, a legislation and media professor at Northeastern College, advised The Verge.
It won’t actually be troublesome for Musk to get a trademark for X given the massive consumer base of the platform. However the issue comes from those that additionally use the X trademark. Microsoft is one in every of them. It had trademarked the X emblem in 2003 for its Xbox console, with the aim listed as “offering on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages amongst laptop customers regarding video and laptop video games.”
Equally, Meta additionally has a trademarked X emblem, that was registered after it acquired Microsoft’s (now defunct) Mixer streaming platform. It additionally pertains to gaming.
On the floor, this doesn’t appear to have an effect on Musk, given his model’s sector is social media. However that may change shortly. With the goal to construct an ‘all the pieces app’, gaming will finally must be part of it. Each WeChat and Seize, present tremendous apps, have gaming inside the software. But when Musk swerves into gaming, this will create a possible authorized difficulty with each Meta and Microsoft.
These are nonetheless early days, and X will little question be trying into the technicalities of all of those points, however it is going to be attention-grabbing to see how all the pieces pans out, finally.