0019. The logo is a boat whose mainsail is a B

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-10-19

Context

The first logo, three stacked layers (app, features, shared), was a placeholder. It looked like many stack, layer and database logos, and nothing in it said bare, ship or offline. With create-bareship on npm, the logo is now seen first on the npm page, the README, the GitHub avatar and a 16 px browser tab, so it needs to be recognisable at small sizes and specific to Bareship.

Logo principles used: simple, distinctive and appropriate at once; memorable enough to sketch; legible at 16 px; works in one colour and on light and dark. Ten concepts were drawn and compared at every size (assets/brand/concepts/, with the research in its index.html).

Decision

• The mark is a sailboat: a jib, a mainsail shaped as a B, and a hull (concept G, “Sail B”). From a distance it is a boat (ship); up close the mainsail spells the name. The jib and the B are two sails on one hull, like iOS and Android on one codebase.
• Colours stay the app’s primary blue: #0A6C96 in light mode, #55B6E0 in dark mode. No theme changes.
• Files: assets/brand/logo.svg (splash), assets/brand/icon.svg (app icon, white on blue), website/src/assets/logo-light.svg and logo-dark.svg, website/public/favicon.svg and the share image (website/scripts/og-image.mjs). The mark is drawn on a 64 × 64 grid; the same three paths are used in every file.
• The concepts folder stays in the repository as the record of this decision and is left out of apps made from the template.

Consequences

• Apps made from the template start with this icon and splash as their placeholder; pnpm icons and pnpm splash replace them as before.
• The GitHub repository’s social preview and any avatars are set by hand outside the repository.

Alternatives considered

• Hull B (a monogram B with a hull bowl), Prompt sail (>_ as a boat), Twin sails, Cargo, Message in a bottle, Hull folder, and combinations of the first three (Prompt B, Prompt boat, Keel B). Prompt B said the most but was too busy at 16 px; the plain monogram and plain sailboat each said only half.
• Keep the stacked layers: generic, and it says nothing about Bareship.