Why Dunkin’ and Lego rebrands succeeded – but X missed the mark

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Twitter has swapped the fluffy bird that used to symbolise the social media platform for a spindly black X.

Ditching the company's well-known logo and changing its name to a letter often associated with danger, death and the unknown is only the latest user-aggravating step CEO Elon Musk has taken since he bought Twitter in October 2022 for USD 44 billion.

The reaction has mainly been a mix of ambivalence, ridicule and scorn. For the most part, longtime Twitter users are unhappy at what they perceived as another unnecessary change that's eroding their enthusiasm for the social media platform.

It's hard to find anybody praising the change so far, except perhaps some of Elon Musk's most devoted fans. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey signalled that he was finding the uproar overblown.

I'm paying close attention to this corporate pivot because I'm a scholar of design who researches social media and brand campaigns. Logos and brand names change all the time and rarely cause this much commotion. But because these changes go deeper than most, I believe the risks of damage to the company are greater.

X might strike you as a weird brand name, and the change may seem to have happened out of the blue, but Musk has long been smitten with the letter.

In 2000, the founders of PayPal ousted him as CEO for trying to change its name to “X,” his Tesla models are famously named S, 3, X and Y – which displayed together basically spell out the word “SEXY,” and one of his many children is named X on his birth certificate.

I would describe the new logo, submitted by a Twitter user, as a white-on-black, sans-serif X consisting of two strokes. It's minimal and modern – and a stark departure from Twitter's iconic blue-and-white bird. That shade of blue