The new CSS logo

For the first time ever, CSS has its own official logo. Just a few days ago, it was officially shared with the world. I know there were already multiple logos used for CSS. The official CSS3 logo was one of them. Even before that, we used to show which version of CSS we were using. Around 2004, in the stone age of the web, we had multiple badges in the footer of websites to let users know that the website was built with HTML4.1, XHTML, CSS2.1, and more. Over the years, this became less necessary and eventually disappeared from the internet.

Why the CSS3 logo got obsoleted?

Due to the evolution of the CSS standard, it became obsolete. CSS3 has existed for almost 25 years, and we got the CSS3 logo around 2011. From that point, it was said that there wouldn't be a CSS4, as CSS3 was module-based and a living standard. In the last few years, there have been discussions within the CSS group to change this, and they started talking about what CSS4 should be. They are already talking about CSS5. Because of this, they decided it was time for an official CSS logo that was not linked to a version number, making it future-proof.

The new official CSS Logo

The new official CSS logo is interesting because it contains both the past and the future of CSS. Let’s start by looking at the color. The CSS group chose the color rebeccapurple. This color was one of the last colors added to CSS, back in mid-2014.​

The history of rebeccapurple

Years ago, I already wrote a blog post about rebeccapurple on my personal Dutch blog. But for the non-Dutch speakers among us, I will include an updated version here. Purple was the favorite color of Rebecca Alison Meyer, who passed away twelve hours into her sixth birthday from brain cancer. Rebecca was the daughter of prolific CSS standards pioneer Eric Meyer. Eric kept his online colleagues informed about the battle his daughter and family were waging through blog posts and brief updates on Twitter. After hearing the awful news, designer/author Jeffrey Zeldman decided to do something.

What started as a hashtag charity campaign eventually transformed into a much larger project. Given Eric’s prolific work on CSS, it was proposed that the hex-value #663399, a shade of purple, be aliased to “beccapurple.”

When informed of the initiative, Eric had one request: if the standards body were to adopt the proposal, they should call it “rebeccapurple” instead. Eric wrote that “Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca.”

In late June 2014, the proposal was finalized, and “rebeccapurple” was officially adopted as the color purple with the hex value #663399.

The font used in the CSS logo

The logo uses DINish Condensed Bold, which is open-source and free to use. The numbers have been slightly adjusted to match the overall logo, so we advise you to only use the official logos provided by the CSS Next Community Group inside this repository to keep the logo recognizable across different sources. This font is based on the German DIN 1451 standard, which was introduced around 1931.

Conclusion

The new official CSS logo is more than just a design—it's a symbol of the evolution and future of CSS. By choosing rebeccapurple, a color that carries both emotional and historical significance, and a timeless font rooted in design standards, the CSS community has created a logo that connects the past with the future. As CSS continues to evolve, this logo will stand as a representation of the living standard that CSS has become—one that is not bound to any specific version but instead looks forward to the innovations and improvements that will shape the web for years to come. The new logo is a reminder of how far CSS has come and the exciting journey that still lies ahead.