[HN Gopher] CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapu...
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CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple`
 
Author : thunderbong
Score  : 500 points
Date   : 2024-11-17 04:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
 
web link (michaelcharl.es)
w3m dump (michaelcharl.es)
 
| empathy_m wrote:
| Eric Meyer's posts about his daughter's illness, and the family's
| lifelong process of grieving afterward, are heartbreaking. It's
| arresting, gripping writing. It's wonderful and awful. Hug your
| loved ones tight.
| https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...
 
  | 29athrowaway wrote:
  | Those posts are definitely not for everyone. It is a deep dive
  | into the emotions of a grieving father for over a decade.
  | 
  | I really hope that man can find peace.
 
  | kaelig wrote:
  | "wonderful and awful" is such a brilliant way to capture this.
  | Thank you
 
  | arrowsmith wrote:
  | Ouch. As a father, that was a gutpunch. Dark, haunting,
  | dripping with grief and pain, but beautifully written and very
  | haunting.
  | 
  | I can't imagine anything worse than what that guy has been
  | through.
  | 
  | I'm holding my sleeping baby as I write this and I just hugged
  | him even tighter. Thanks for sharing.
 
  | ericwood wrote:
  | Thank you for linking this. I read bits and pieces of this as
  | it was happening but it never fully registered for me at 24.
  | I'm sitting here 10 years later at 34 having lost our son at 23
  | weeks. His due date was this past week. It's affected me in
  | ways that still surprise, befuddle, and sometimes scare me. I
  | cannot even begin to fathom what he's been through; the most
  | recent blog post has me in tears.
  | 
  | I have really strong memories of learning HTML, CSS, and
  | javascript in high school, and spending time in the school
  | library picking apart css/edge. It felt like the dawn of a new
  | era, I was in awe of the things I saw there. I built more than
  | a few sites trying to get my head around the complexispiral
  | demo, and spent countless hours diving into resources I found
  | there (like A List Apart! I will never forget the suckerfish
  | drop-downs). This is one of the few moments I have such vivid
  | memories of that were directly responsible me for pursuing
  | computer engineering and ultimately going so far into UI/UX and
  | the web. I've never written it out this explicitly but: thank
  | you for everything, Eric.
 
    | Cordiali wrote:
    | I hope every day is a bit easier than the last for you.
 
    | ten13 wrote:
    | Thank you for sharing, Eric. It's been a few years now for me
    | since we lost our son before I ever had the chance to meet
    | him and I'm not sure it's any easier. Stories like yours and
    | that of others help us all know we're not alone in our grief
    | though so I encourage you to keep sharing and telling your
    | story.
 
  | whatever1 wrote:
  | How can the game be so unfair for some? People don't deserve
  | this.
 
    | mewpmewp2 wrote:
    | Makes you think how life so easily and randomly can be so
    | different irrespective of who you are or what you do to
    | affect you forever.
 
    | agumonkey wrote:
    | it's indeed strange to realize that life / universe can
    | crunch everything brainlessly in some spot while everything
    | else is colorful around
 
  | czhu12 wrote:
  | Having never had children myself, his writing moved me in a way
  | that I struggle to comprehend. I spent my 2 hour commute
  | reading through all of his writing on his time, and subsequent
  | grief of his daughter, starting here:
  | https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/18/welcome-2/
  | 
  | I found this piece particularly moving, and brought me to
  | tears:
  | 
  | https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/10/so-many-nevers...
 
| graypegg wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see where we end up using this. I don't
| honestly see the CSS3 shield this is meant to replace very often
| anymore.
| 
| Probably the place where it'll be seen the most is in IDE file
| trees, where I'm a bit worried it'll just look like a little
| purple blob
 
  | kijin wrote:
  | File Browser / Finder maybe, but the text inside the boxes are
  | too small for IDE file trees.
  | 
  | VS Code shows "JS" in yellow text without the box, against a
  | dark background. CSS is just a blue hash symbol. Maybe they'll
  | change the color to rebeccapurple, but I don't think there's
  | room for a box around the symbol.
 
| voat wrote:
| For some reason, I was under the impression that the blue shield
| was the css logo.
| 
| But after looking at it, I realized that it was just for CSS 3
| and I'm not sure if it was even official?
 
| swayvil wrote:
| It's a nice purple.
 
  | usbsea wrote:
  | A simple one too - it would be on a 216 colour pallete using
  | six values for each of R, G and B.
  | 
  | R = 1/5
  | 
  | G = 2/5
  | 
  | B = 3/5
  | 
  | Edit: of course that makes sense it is probably a "web safe"
  | one
 
    | kijin wrote:
    | If it's such a simple combination, I wonder why it wasn't
    | officially named until 2014. CSS has had names for all sorts
    | of weird colors since forever.
 
      | duskwuff wrote:
      | Most CSS color names were inherited from the X11 color list
      | [1], which, in turn, sourced its colors from a weird
      | mixture of Crayola crayons, paint samples, and
      | idiosyncratic personal choices [2]. It's a mess.
      | 
      | [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/mas
      | ter/di...
      | 
      | [2]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
      | style/2014Mar/0272....
 
      | labster wrote:
      | Maybe it wasn't named so that long after people like me
      | pass from memory for good, people will still speak of
      | Rebecca and of the love we showed her.
 
| otteromkram wrote:
| > Update 22 Jun 14: the proposal was approved by the CSS WG and
| added to the CSS4 Colors module. Patches to web browsers have
| already happened in nightly builds. (I'm just now catching up on
| this after the unexpected death of Kat's father early Saturday
| morning.)
| 
| Mr. Meyer certainly had a rough 2014.
| 
| Kudos to him and all his CSS contributions over the years. I hope
| he has been able to find some solace since then.
 
  | aryonoco wrote:
  | I would say he hasn't, considering a few months ago he wrote "A
  | Decade Later, A Decade Lost"
  | https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2024/06/07/a-decade-later...
  | 
  | And I can't blame him. They say no parent should see their
  | child die, and that's certainly true; but especially no parent
  | should see their 6 year old child die of brain cancer. Humans
  | are not built to withstand that.
 
| pstuart wrote:
| I didn't expect a logo update to bring tears to my eyes.
 
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
| 
|  _Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186932 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
| 
|  _Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565503 - May 2015 (33
| comments)
| 
|  _Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677 - June 2014 (25
| comments)
| 
|  _In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863890 - June 2014 (68
| comments)
 
  | brianzelip wrote:
  | An official logo for CSS -
  | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42124786 - November 2024
 
| WD-42 wrote:
| I really don't like these logos that are boxes with text in the
| lower right. The post cites a "common design language" with other
| tech but this has to be the most low effort language imaginable.
 
  | kijin wrote:
  | I think Adobe started this trend. A box with "Ps" inside for
  | Photoshop, "Lr" for Lightroom, etc. for all their products.
  | 
  | An entire generation of web designers grew up with their heads
  | stuck in the Adobe ecosystem, so this must look like the gold
  | standard to them.
  | 
  | At least Adobe made an effort to make their logos look like
  | symbols on the periodic table.
 
    | hxii wrote:
    | To me these made sense, as I was able to quickly, visually
    | distinguish PhotoShop by the "PS" letters instead of trying
    | to decipher a 32x32 logo.
 
  | usbsea wrote:
  | You prefer these?
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#/media/File:HTML5_logo_a...
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CSS3_logo_and_wordmark.sv...
 
    | ohmahjong wrote:
    | Not who you are replying to, but I started learning HTML/CSS
    | right when HTML5 and CSS3 had just come out, so I do have
    | somewhat of a soft spot for these
 
    | wruza wrote:
    | Is this the only choice we have?
 
    | NBJack wrote:
    | They are certainly more colorblind and vision impairment
    | friendly to be honest.
 
      | HL33tibCe7 wrote:
      | What is color blind unfriendly about the new logos
      | precisely? Which variant of color blindness will not be
      | able to read them?
      | 
      | Which visual impairment exactly will find it easier to
      | parse the previous logos (which are a mess of design
      | scarcely related to the actual technology name) than the
      | current ones, which contain thick bold text indicating
      | exactly what the technology is called?
 
    | geoffpado wrote:
    | Yes.
 
    | WD-42 wrote:
    | Yes.
 
    | brailsafe wrote:
    | Absolutely prefer these
 
    | cyborgx7 wrote:
    | They're so much nicer.
 
      | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
      | They remind me way too much of dark-arts virus checker,
      | disk cleaner BS.
 
  | readthenotes1 wrote:
  | the design language is really "keep it inside the box, don't
  | worry about your self-imposed solution constraints"
 
  | lemagedurage wrote:
  | They could've added some character by letting the text overflow
  | the box :)
 
    | geon wrote:
    | The rounded corners was a suitable reference to css, I think.
 
    | cantSpellSober wrote:
    | That's been the unofficial "logo for CSS" for years:
    | https://i0.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-
    | content/uploads/2017/06/...
    | 
    | It appears this option was discussed: https://github.com/CSS-
    | Next/css-next/issues/105#issuecomment...
 
  | tannhaeuser wrote:
  | You're absolutely right, especially considering the canonical
  | CSS-in-a-box logo has long been established [1], and they
  | should really embrace it if they had any sense of humor.
  | 
  | Perhaps those brutalist logos were designed specifically such
  | that they could be rendered using CSS itself? Though I could
  | understand why they'd want to distance themselves from the old
  | "shield" logo that turned out to signify shielding "browser
  | vendors" from broad implementation of CSS renderers and to keep
  | a niche of job security at W3C, Inc. due to rampant and
  | unwarranted complexity, but in any case was burnt by being
  | placed next to vulgar metalhand vectors, not to speak of being
  | culturally discriminative when viewed in a "woke"
  | interpretation.
  | 
  | [1]:
  | https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.13378023.4114/raf,750x1000,0...
 
    | thiht wrote:
    | > especially considering the canonical CSS-in-a-box logo has
    | long been established
    | 
    | Is this a joke? I've never seen it in my life, not even sure
    | where you're pulling it from
 
  | somat wrote:
  | Disagree, but then again my soulless engineer's heart has close
  | to zero tolerance for design for design's sake, so what do I
  | know?
  | 
  | The most important part about convoying that an item is CSS is
  | including the letters CSS. So while I am a little disgusted
  | they wasted time on an icon at all, I will admit that many of
  | our design language structures demand an icon. So I am somewhat
  | relieved they managed to dodge the design for design's sake
  | crowd and picked the best possible one. A non-descript box with
  | the letters CSS in it.
 
    | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
    | "Non-descript" is unfair - it has 3 rounded corners!
 
  | kalleboo wrote:
  | They should have centered the text in it both vertically and
  | horizontally
 
    | reddalo wrote:
    | It's impossible to do that with CSS :)
 
      | matsemann wrote:
      | Could've used this classic CSS joke as the logo https://i.e
      | tsystatic.com/21468781/r/il/426363/2712010149/il_...
 
  | egypturnash wrote:
  | Yeah these are programmer art.
  | 
  | Or clones of Adobe's lame branding.
 
  | fenomas wrote:
  | I once saw an interview with an apparently well-known logo
  | designer, who said something to the effect of: "When somebody
  | sees my work and says 'that's nothing, anybody could make
  | that', that means they instantly got the logo, understood its
  | structure, with no distraction. That's what it's meant to do,
  | so to me it's a compliment."
  | 
  | Whether that applies here is naturally subjective, but hearing
  | that changed how I look at logo designs a bit.
 
    | latexr wrote:
    | There's a limit to that. By that token, every logo in
    | existence could be a white square with black text on it.
    | Clearly they are not, because people understand the need for
    | some differentiation. Even in this case, the logos benefit
    | from having colour.
    | 
    | And they're not even consistent. Three of them are squares,
    | two of them are different shapes, and despite the simplicity
    | even something as trivial as the font size and spacing isn't
    | uniform.
 
  | spiffytech wrote:
  | While they aren't snazzy, they do have some benefits that often
  | go unconsidered:
  | 
  | Logos are sometimes printed on shirts (in monochrome, or where
  | rich coloring costs extra), or embroidered onto hats, or read
  | at a distance (like conference booth posters), or printed to
  | B/W official letterhead, or scaled down for an icon pack. A 3rd
  | party will include a logo on something with a preexisting
  | style, and it should look okay there.
  | 
  | A logo which is structurally simple and uses few colors can be
  | easily adapted to these scenarios -- printed in black-and-
  | white, or as an outline without solid colors.
 
| asddubs wrote:
| >The design follows the design language of the logos of other web
| technologies like JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly.
| 
| and yet it's 5 logos with 3 different font sizes and at least 3
| different font faces
| 
| 3 of which are perfect rectangles, and 2 of which are slight
| variations on rectangles
| 
| i guess it perfectly represents the ecosystem, no notes
 
  | globalise83 wrote:
  | This is the evolution of "Design by committee" to "Design by 3
  | committees"
 
  | Maken wrote:
  | To fully represent HTML, they should be displayed with sightly
  | different fonts and kerning in each operating system.
 
| langsoul-com wrote:
| > The color was originally going to be called beccapurple, but
| Meyer asked that it instead be named rebeccapurple, as his
| daughter had wanted to be called Rebecca once she had turned six.
| She had said that Becca was a "baby name," and that once she had
| turned six, she wanted to be called Rebecca. As Eric Meyer put
| it, "She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So
| Rebecca it is and must be."
| 
| Wasn't expecting tears over a colour
 
  | jvm___ wrote:
  | ..in 2014 in honor of Eric Meyer's daughter, Rebecca, who
  | passed away at the age of six on her birthday from brain
  | cancer.
 
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| I will never ever forget this color name and the story behind it
| for the rest of my life.
 
| Crazyontap wrote:
| I think we're stretching the definition of "logos" here. Just
| sticking text in a square doesn't make it a true logo.
| 
| Think of Apple or Nike, those are real logos. The recent logos
| and icons, including apps like Photoshop's, seem more like we're
| prioritizing metrics over creativity.
 
  | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
  | Tell Gap (and all the rest).
 
  | striking wrote:
  | What about those of IBM, Facebook, Google, Netflix, or Uber?
  | They're just words, with gentle stylization. Sometimes their
  | logos take on the shape of a single letter in a box, which by
  | your standards might even be less creative.
  | 
  | But there are reasons for this. Plain wordmarks are high-
  | contrast and easy to read almost by default, and they work
  | great with groups that aren't already aware of your brand. Or
  | as Netflix puts it
  | (https://brand.netflix.com/en/assets/logos/),
  | 
  | > The Wordmark remains an essential identifier of our brand.
  | While our goal is to lead with the N Symbol, we enlist the
  | Wordmark to ensure brand recognition in low-awareness markets
  | or when production limits the use of color.
  | 
  | CSS doesn't have a ton of brand awareness. Making something
  | akin to the Nike Swoosh for CSS won't catch on, it's not like
  | they have the money to flood your Instagram feed with it and
  | force that brand recognition on you.
  | 
  | Going back to Netflix why would they use a single gently
  | stylized letter where possible? Well,
  | 
  | > In high-awareness markets, we lead with the N Symbol. There
  | is power in owning a letter of the alphabet: it's universal and
  | instantly identifiable as shorthand for our brand.
  | 
  | That's right. Netflix wants to own the letter N. I think "CSS"
  | is in the same position: owning a combination of three letters
  | is a power move. That's the most valuable thing about the "CSS
  | brand," if ever there were one, so why not lead with it?
  | 
  | But maybe your opinion is still that all of these designers are
  | full of it (apparently including Paul Rand).
 
  | thiht wrote:
  | This is definitely a logo, by all definitions of the word. It's
  | not just "text in a box", it's:
  | 
  | - text, with a specific font, position, size, weight
  | 
  | - a specific color
  | 
  | - a box radius in 3 corners
  | 
  | - some variants
  | 
  | By your definition, the Coca Cola logo is not a logo because
  | it's "just text"
 
| QuentinCh wrote:
| I am in a train and I stopped reading because I was crying too
| much. The fact that the reminder of this story hides in plain
| sight, in the form of a named CSS color, makes it even more
| touching for some reason.
 
| Ecco wrote:
| Without even judging the overall design (personally I don't mind
| the simplicity), why on earth do they use such inconsistent
| fonts? 3 different font sizes (and maybe also mismatching
| horizontal spacings) for 5 assorted logos??? This is insane...
 
  | cachvico wrote:
  | It's incredibly ironic
 
  | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
  | You want them to be even _less_ distinctive? Personally, I
  | think they should lean into that more and embrace the context:
  | e.g. sans-serif for CSS, monospace for JS, serif for HTML.
 
    | latexr wrote:
    | The current logos are both uninteresting and badly
    | constructed. At least either make them consistent (less
    | distinctive but you can appreciate them as thought out as
    | part of a family) or wildly different (more distinctive but
    | not as clear they're part of a family). This middle ground is
    | the worst of all possible options.
 
  | usrusr wrote:
  | Because they are still logos, not one list of short acronyms
  | that just happens to be rendered in a specific way?
  | 
  | I really think it's fine: the web assembly gets to play with
  | its parallels between W and A, JS gets to mirror the J's
  | bottom-bend in its S (TS tagging along because those two really
  | are more than just accidental neighbors), whereas CSS can
  | indulge in summetry with its twin S by making them internally
  | symmetric themselves. A logo that contains an acronym isn't
  | really a logo when the characters are just picked from some
  | font instead of tailored as part of the logo.
 
    | latexr wrote:
    | > Because they are still logos, not one list of short
    | acronyms that just happens to be rendered in a specific way?
    | 
    | Consistency still matters. If you're going through the
    | trouble of making logos similar so they are understood as
    | part of a family, don't give up half way.
 
| pino82 wrote:
| Why does it include TS? I would never have called it a 'web
| technology'. A lot of people use it in their tech stack, but
| fortunately, the browser does not even understand it, right?
 
| qark wrote:
| Is there any link that explains why this particular shade of
| purple was chosen to represent Rebecca?
 
  | felbane wrote:
  | Purple was her favorite color. #639 is shorthand for about the
  | purplest purple you can make with RGB. Jeff Zeldman proposed
  | the color name on Twitter and in a blog post shortly after she
  | died, and it understandably caught on.
 
| npteljes wrote:
| I used rebeccapurple a lot as well, unknowing of the touching
| story behind it. I coded CSS by hand (back in like 2010), and for
| placeholders, I used the simple colors I knew, like "green" or
| "blue". And "red", of course, too. But when typing "re" for
| "red", I noticed that it autocompletes to "rebeccapurple", which
| amused me, since I thought it's kind of a nonsense to have a
| color named like that. Over time, I used it a lot, and it became
| a kind of a favorite of mine.
 
| gedy wrote:
| This would have been quite funny instead:
| 
| https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1851735303.3881/flat,750x,07...
 
| atlih wrote:
| <3
 
| pmkary wrote:
| The bar for a logo has become so low. I don't understand how we
| reached here and everyone are happy about it.
 
| kmeisthax wrote:
| GNU Rebecca Meyer
 
| laserstrahl wrote:
| https://github.com/vic/rebecca-theme I thought it derrives from
| this.
| 
| Haha
 
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