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.
The font is Monotype’s Special Alphabets 4. Who wants to bet Musk didn’t pay for the rights before slapping it all over the place?
@parismarx this is so perfect. musk has perfected the art of awful decision making
@parismarx Knowing how big tech works it was probably something "really quick" the team asked for in an interview with a prospective marketer, then they closed the position because the person "wasn't a good fit."
@parismarx what a billionaire. 
@parismarx
Normal companies: Let's hire someone to design a logo, check how it works in various situations, digital, printed, check it's not easily confused with someone else's, focus group it, get it signed off, have a rebranding project plan and only then launch it.
Musk: We're X now, LOL. Here's a second-hand logo.
@parismarx It’s a mathematics blackboard bold, to be more descriptive about it. That’s the sort of ‘special alphabet’ Monotype meant.
@parismarx I mean, there's really no designer at all. It is simply a widely used mathematical symbol.
@chemoelectric @parismarx Existing mainly because mathematicians go through alphabets like the toilet paper in the only latrine hut at Camp Dysentery.
@log German mathematicians tend to rely more on the reader’s ability to know what the heck an expression is talking about, and less on the reader having to refer back to a legend.
Thus the plain letter c might be a scalar or it might be a vector or whatnot.
One of my numerical analysis texts (from the 1980s when I went to both undergrad and grad school, studying engineering) was translated from German and it was like that. Very refreshing! No crazy arrows and such above things, either.
@log I mean, there might have been some circumflexes and such. I’d have to go look and see. Probably not used like physicists use them, though, to mark something as ‘unit’. (One can do that in a mathematician’s way by naming it ‘e’.) At least surely there were some tic marks.
@chemoelectric I have also, long ago, donated my surplus funky symbols to the mathematicians' punctuation fund, for busy symbol manipulators who desperately need new function notation or enclosing brackets with different meanings. Things are a little better now with Unicode, but I'm sure it must be a little embarrassing to run into someone at a conference who has been mining the same archaeographic code plane as you.
@log The real problem is that, though Scheme and Common Lisp will accept nearly anything (EXCEPT, in particular, vertical bars) as parts of symbols, Ada is much pickier. It rejects superscript and subscript numerals, for instance. It has no way to do lots of things. It merely lets you use a mix of language scripts. :(
@log By ‘Scheme’ I mean the 7th Revision.
) Fair warning -- Chaos Monkey's legal team might target you on the premise that your last name causes confusion in the marketplace in that it combines his favorite planet and the symbol for the platform formerly known as "Twiter".
@parismarx there's more than a passing similarity to this
Nobody left to sue?
Xorg fans are Display Server Conservatives
X fans are political conservatives
Xorg fans love decades old software
X fans love centuries old customs and archaic laws
Xorg fans are okay without compositing
X fans are okay without moderation
Somebody said that this being a standard Unicode font means the logo cannot be copyrighted/trademarked, which would be absolutely hilarious
This is what I came here to find out. Can anybody confirm?
@jztusk @jherazob @parismarx It's just one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols This symbol is used in mathematics.
@danielbluhn @jztusk @parismarx
Well, there it is, U+1D54F, 𝕏
@jztusk @jherazob @parismarx There is much better explanation and background here, if you are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_bold
@parismarx To be honest, there is no law that is against Elon being an idiot. It's his right to be one.
@parismarx it's the price to pay when you don't hire a designer even tho you have billions of dollars in your pocket #karma
@parismarx he doesnt even pay taxes or rent...
Elon: We removed a pixel from the outmost points. Go ahead, sue me.
@parismarx He probably thought buying one copy of the font granted him unlimited use of it.
Looking forward to the font foundry suing him if this is the case.
@parismarx they’re getting paid by X-posure
@parismarx "a font he found online" yeah sounds like the EULA was fully respected there
@parismarx ;)
\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\DeclareFontFamily{U}{futm}{}
\DeclareFontShape{U}{futm}{m}{n}{
<-> s * [60] fourier-bb
}{}
\DeclareMathAlphabet{\mathbb}{U}{futm}{m}{n}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\noindent $\mathbb{X}$
\end{document}
@parismarx It also bears a remarkable similarity to a freely available Unicode character in some fonts: "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X" (U+1D54F): 𝕏
@parismarx Never mind "special font". 𝕏 is literally just a standard Unicode character.
@parismarx wonder if the band X has any recourse?
@parismarx hey, when you’re one of the richest people on the planet, you don’t have to pay for things. That’s how you get to be rich. You steal stuff.