Elon Musk’s new ‘X’ logo raises some legal questions.
Now that Elon Musk has officially replaced Twitter’s logo with an X, many of us are wondering: can he actually use it?
The drastic rebranding doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Musk-watchers. Musk has long touted his idea of X as an “everything” app that offers audio, video, messaging, and support for digital payments. He has also founded a company called X.com before it merged with PayPal in the year 2000. While that name never resurfaced, that didn’t stop Musk from incorporating the letter X into all his other brands, including SpaceX, xAI, X Corp., and now Twitter.
On Sunday, Musk declared that Twitter will be rebranded as X and turned to the site’s community to commission a new logo. “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow,” Musk wrote. That night, Twitter user Sawyer Merritt offered up an X logo he no longer needed, which Musk scooped right up. But while its design seems somewhat unique at first glance, the notion of one chunky, angular line crossing over a thin one wasn’t created from scratch.
Correction to my previous reply: @ajtourville designed the thicker X logo below for our (now discontinued) @OfficialXPod. The thicker logo was inspired by a font he found online (bottom right). I created the video above using the font logo, adding a glow and little lines in the… pic.twitter.com/GF0l2KM2Vt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 23, 2023
Merritt says the designer he worked with was merely “inspired by a font he found online,” but that designer seems to contradict that with a post of his own, stating he based it on a Unicode character. And that designer’s statement doesn’t necessarily clear things up, either: while Twitter’s new logo does look like it could have been inspired by a Unicode character, it looks almost exactly like one from Monotype. Either way, online sleuths have traced the design back to both potential sources.
Monotype is the typeface company that has created some of the world’s most recognizable fonts, including Times New Roman and Arial. If you look at the letter “X” in Monotype’s Special Alphabets 4, you’ll notice that it closely resembles Twitter’s new logo design. (Twitter’s first stab at the X looks like the lowercase X, while a thicker one that Musk briefly tried looks like the capital X from Monotype.)
While Ars Technica got confirmation from Monotype that the logo isn’t the same as the capital X in Special Alphabets 4, it still hasn’t heard back about the lowercase X, which the logo looks even more like. “We can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s ‘Special Alphabets 4,” Monotype spokesperson Phil Garnham tells Ars Technica.
We reached out to Monotype to see if it could confirm whether the logo matches the lowercase character and didn’t immediately hear back. If Twitter’s logo does, indeed, match up with Monotype’s font, it would need to purchase a license in order to use it.
Source : https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23809087/elon-musk-x-logo-twitter-trademark