Hello, wonderful CodeNewbie Community!
I'm excited to share that the CodeNewbie logo has gotten a makeover for 2022.
Read on to find out why we decided to make a change to our logo and what it signifies 💜
The history of our logo
I founded CodeNewbie in 2014 as a weekly Twitter chat dedicated to connecting and communicating with people learning to code in a welcoming and kind atmosphere.
As you know, the CodeNewbie family has expanded and become much more distributed since then. Over the years, we've launched a podcast (which now has hundreds of episodes), created CodeLand (an annual conference dedicated to early-career developers), and found a new, dedicated home right here on the CodeNewbie Community Forem.
Throughout all of these positive changes in our community, our visual brand has essentially stayed the same. I created our original logo with a lot of thought and care. The bright green color was invigorating and cheerful (a feeling I want all of our community members to carry with them throughout the day). The font is meant to look approachable and not so serious while the speech bubble containing a hashtag is a nod to our original home on Twitter and the open conversations CodeNewbie is built on.
When my team started discussing the fact that it might be time to change up the logo late last year, we soon realized that we loved almost everything about our original one except one thing: the color.
Why The Change from Green?
While there were many fans of our original "CodeNewbie Green" color, over time, we realized that bright green is an incredibly difficult color to work with from a web design perspective. The brightness of the color provides less contrast than is desirable so the logo can be hard to see in certain contexts — and we couldn't use our brand color in any other text we shared.
More importantly and in many contexts, bright green text and graphics are not accessible to many individuals with decreased vision, low vision, or certain types of color-blindness. This is, in part, due to its low contrast score.
In the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), contrast is defined as the difference in brightness between two colors. Brightness difference is represented by a ratio starting at 1:1 (white on white) to 21:1 (black on a white).
So, on a white background, pure green (HEX 00FF00) has an extremely low ratio: 1.4:1. For reference, the original "CodeNewbie Green" on a white background has a color contrast ratio of 1.81:1, which fails WCAG 2's guidelines.
We want to make sure everything we share with our community is as accessible to as many people as possible. That's why we've changed our logo from bright green to purple
What "CodeNewbie Purple" Symbolizes to Us
Most importantly our new logo passes WCAG 2's guidelines for color contrast (with a ratio of 5.68:1 on a white background!) but we also chose dark purple for the symbolism it carries. Purple is the most powerful visible wavelength out of all of the colors in the rainbow, and we see our entire community of CodeNewbies and the knowledge they share as incredibly powerful!
Purple is also a combination of calming blue and fiery red, evoking a sense of balance and wisdom. Throughout history, purple was a prized pigment for its resistance to fading in the sunlight — it typically weathers into a more interesting shade in bright conditions instead of simply becoming dull like many other colors. Additionally, purple is commonly associated with magic ✨
While the CodeNewbie logo change from bright green to deep purple might seem minor, we're excited to have a new brand color that represents everything the CodeNewbie community strives to be: balanced, wise, resilient, and full of magic!
I hope you like it too :)
Top comments (16)
I personally like green over purple but your meaning and mission for greater Accessibility for all is awesome.
Cheers to CodeNewbie Purple! 🙌 🍻 💜
What a beautiful meaning behind the color change 💜
Awesome!
"Purple is also a combination of calming blue and fiery red, evoking a sense of balance and wisdom."
Anyone else think of Mace Windu and his lightsaber? Haha
This is a great look - I never would have thought about the green color being too bright and inaccessible to some. I'm glad others brought that to the light though - and this is a good case lesson for people like me.
This is a great, thoughtful description, encompassing both the journey that the community has been on, and some great sentiments (and technicalities) around the colour change. Thanks for sharing the process.
Cool!
I love the new color ! 💜
In religion, purple symbolizes the Passion of Christ (in the Gospel, soldiers throw a cloak of this color on Christ's shoulders); in imperial England, it was the only color that could be complemented by shades of gray and black during mourning, and was considered a gloomy color until the beginning of the 19th century.