Does Elon Musk’s new ‘X’ logo have meaning? Not yet, but it may

All the upheaval at Twitter (now X), has created major concerns among users and advertisers, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seizing the opportunity to launch Meta’s rival platform, Threads.

The rebrand to X has, of course, meant a new logo – which has created another round of debate.

Dr Thomas Oosthuizen, a South African marketing consultant and academic now based in the United Kingdom, is among those to enter the discussion around the new X logo, and logos in general.

Good logos signify a brand’s role in the world

“Whilst we all love debating them, their primary role is to signify a brand and, if it’s really good, what its role is in this world. That is, technically, what a logo is. To portray and inspire,” he writes in a LinkedIn social media post.

“Very few brands are inherently meaningful, meaning the logo summarises what it stands for. Nike – yes. FedEx – yes. Yet many people may still not make the connection. Logo meanings mostly needs to be learnt.”

Oosthuizen believes that social media brands are almost all meaningless. “A blue thing around Facebook – okay. Instagram is better. An infinity sign (skew at that) around Meta? LinkedIn – what logo?”

He says he liked Twitter’s bird logo, which was cheeky and had significance. 

“At least Twitter had inherent meaning when a tweet was 140 characters, as a tweety-bird that lasted the length of time some presidents spent on the loo. An X uses little imagination … is it different from most logos? No.”

Oosthuizen adds that, as no-one can own a letter of the alphabet, it’s meaning needs to be created.

In the case of the X logo, and the new brand in general, he believes that very little Musk does is meaningless.

“By now we don’t know what to expect from the man [who] has the innovative Midas touch, for all his ‘madness’. So, forget about the X … look at what he does with it.”

You can read the full post here.