Elon Musk gave a masterclass in the best way to destroy a model in a single day By Georgia Coggan printed 31 July 23 However no-one’s speaking about Threads anymore.

Elon Musk’s in a single day rebranding as ‘X’ was a masterclass in the best way to destroy a model identification as rapidly, and seemingly as thoughtlessly, as potential. Certain, a model may often maintain months of behind the scenes rebrand conferences with a number of design consultants – however who wants that, proper? Musk went blundering in, in a means solely Musk may – crowdsourcing a brand and instating it instantly and not using a thought for the remainder of the identification (even the app icon took just a few days to catch up). 

The Twitter model was some of the coherent identities on the market (see our Twitter brand historical past for extra). From the iconography to the language, your entire branding system was rigorously constructed – whether or not or not Twitter as a platform was starting to fail. And it solely took a few tweets to take all of it down.

The X brand itself could not be extra completely different from earlier than, in course of or in ultimate design. The place there was a rigorously constructed chook, chosen from 24 sketches and primarily based on 15 overlapping circles to make sure the curves have been fully good, now there are two overlapping traces impressed by an internet font – and it is even been used as a brand earlier than.

Musk has already indicated the X is prone to be a placeholder, with additional rebranding on the horizon (although it is already been redesigned, twice). And in some ways this shall be in his pursuits. It is laborious to think about how a model identification as complicated as what got here earlier than may presumably come from the shoots of the X. As a result of Musk and his workforce might want to discover replacements for a lot of design parts. If there isn’t any chook, how will we tweet? And what’s the equal of the little feather icon, paying homage to a quill, that denoted creating a brand new message?

In a means, Musk’s destruction of the model was good. In case your goal is to undo a decade’s price of labor, how higher may you obtain that goal by launching a completely unrelated image with no course of in any way? Now the design workforce has to catch up, and rapidly. I simply can’t think about how they’ll scramble to create associated iconography and language to match that of what got here earlier than – whether or not or not they stick to the X.