After spending $44 billion on Twitter—a business move that makes Meta’s metaverse investment seem like such a cunning and brilliant plan that you may believe Mark Zuckerberg is Steve Jobs reincarnated—Elon Musk has been making one poor decision after another. But today we don’t need another 5,000-word article detailing his many blunders. Today we can simply marvel at the train wreck that is the Twitter Blue branding—a garish ’80s throwback of a word mark that’s meant to promote the recently relaunched subscription service.
I first imagined the logo have been Musk himself using the screensaver tool from Microsoft’s 1995 operating system. He wouldn’t be the first or the last CEO who got his hands deep into the corporate image of their own company. Jobs was famous for doing the same, to the extent that he corrected text kerning in Apple’s printed materials, chose fonts for entire operating systems, and personally hired a luminary like Paul Rand to create the NeXT logo. UPDATE: I was wrong. As it turns out, Twitter developed this logo before Musks’s time, and it can be seen in marketing materials last year.
You don’t have to be a typography expert to see that there’s no structure to the lettering—especially that fattened B with the bird as the counter (which is actually used in Twitter’s app as part of the UI). It’s just gross and barely legible; the shiny color version can’t be reproduced anywhere in any reliable way, and it doesn’t fit Twitter’s own corporate standards. (This thing doesn’t even attempt to be blue. It’s purple and pink and whatever . . . is that gold or tropical orange? The hell I know).
But maybe, just maybe it’s actually a perfect logo and branding? Maybe the 1980s chromed style is spot-on for its function because it is the perfect symbol of what Twitter—and, by extension, Musk’s persona—has become. It’s a full double rainbow of garish taste, gibberish, and absurd artifice that is all gloss and zero substance. It’s “more is more” to try to make money out of a burning trash can full of bad ideas. It’s also a perfect representation of the vanity and vacuity of the self-aggrandizing Twitter check system.
This story has been updated to reflect that the logo was in use in Twitter marketing materials in 2021.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
