cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2399016
Twitter’s new X logo wasn’t made by an in-house designer. It’s from an old podcast hosted by one of the cult that Elon took from his replies.
Musk's logo for "X" is literally just Unicode Character “𝕏” (U+1D54F).
Which means that #Musk can't trademark the logo.
That's not accurate. Copyright and trademark are two different things. The name "twitter" is also just a combination of preexisting characters and the word was probably in use before the company was founded. You can still trademark existing things because trademarks are about preventing consumer confusion, not protecting original creations.
Musk does have a problem with copyright if it turns out this specific design was made by someone else.
The US Patent and Trademark Office is generally reluctant to enforce single-letter trademarks, and some countries ban them outright.
The good news is that "x com" can be trademarked.
The bad news is that "x com" is already trademarked.
xcom is trademarked as a video game. There can be existing trademarks in different spaces. So you could easily get an xcom social media site trademarked.
Yes, it's trademarked for use in video games.
And by another company for use in sporting equipment.
And by another company for fiber optics.
And by another company, as follows...
Telecommunications services, namely, transmission of voice, data, graphics, images, audio, and video via the internet
Yeah, maybe should've stuck with "Twitter"
That's too many letters though. I'm starting to think this imbecile is just tired of sounding out all seven letters multiple times a day. X is nice and simple, like him.
Let's split the difference. "Twit" fits.
We'll see. The reality is that if you pay enough you can probably get the trademark off of anyone.
Yeah... But maybe not ANYONE... "Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has already registered an 'X' logo in connection to 'online social networking services' and 'social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development.'"
True, but ~~Twitter~~ X isn't exactly flush with cash right now. And if it aspires to be an "everything app", it might take more than one payoff.
I mean if Elon is going to push it, he has plenty of cash to invest into the company to buy out anything. He's also not above just using his personal assets for the company. E.g. X.com now redirects to Twitter.com.
Thats true but anyway it doesnt make sense do trash a Brand that has becone verb, has its Logo on Millionen of Websites and is refered to by probably every news Website in existence. Imagine if McDonalds changed their golden M to a gray O.
Imagine the confusion when people order a "Big O".
“I'm losing control of the situation!!!” —Elon Musk, probably
Not to defend musk, but it's not from one specific font. The logo is just Unicode char 1D54F, a blackboard bold X/"MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X"
Lol so he put even less effort into it than we thought
👏⏱️👏
A character is nothing without a font though. When you look at a character on-screen, it's being rendered in a specific font. Typing that Unicode character in "Special Alphabets 4" produces the image in question.
The character (𝕏) doesn’t actually doesn’t exist in the font, because supporting arbitrary Unicode characters in every font would be absurd. Paste it into the font preview and it renders a black square.
There are fonts that support every unicode character though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts supports up to Unicode 13. How do you think phones display every single unicode character in a text message?
Of course there are fonts that support every character, the characters themselves would be useless if they couldn’t be rendered by anything. I’m only saying that this specific font doesn’t support the character.
Oh, I see, I misread. That's interesting. So it looks like it's typically just a glyph.
Does Musk even have any “In-house” designers anymore? Figured those were let got with the rest of the teams.
fonts are ridiculously cheap if you're a billionaire. Musk is stupid, but I doubt he'd be so stupid he didn't pay the like $200 fee.
You'd be surprised
If your font has the potential to be made into a logo, you would think the designer would have the sense to negotiate a higher rate. I have no idea if that's how it is in practice, but to do otherwise seems quite foolish.
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.