What’s Behind the New Official CSS Logo? History, Design, and Meaning

In 1994, while working at CERN, Håkon W. Lie published an early proposal called “Cascading HTML Style Sheets” (CHSS), which allowed both user‑defined and author style sheets and could combine rules by percentage. This concept is regarded as the origin of CSS.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) first appeared in 1996, giving developers the ability to style web pages. Since then it has become an indispensable part of the Web, evolving to perform tasks once requiring JavaScript, including mathematical functions, transformations and animations.

To celebrate CSS’s milestones, in August 2024 Google Chrome CSS developer advocate Adam Argyle launched an open call for a new official CSS logo. The public submission process gathered many creative variants.

After several months, on 12 November 2024 a vote selected the purple design as the new official CSS logo, replacing the long‑standing shield logo that emphasized “CSS3”. The new logo is intended to represent the whole CSS ecosystem, aligning with other web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript and WebAssembly.

The designer initially chose a hot‑pink colour, likening CSS to “the makeup of the Web”. However, the CSS Working Group and community later preferred the colour “rebeccapurple” (hex #663399), a tribute to Rebecca Meyer, the six‑year‑old daughter of CSS expert Eric A. Meyer, whose favourite colour was purple.

“rebeccapurple” was named to honor Rebecca Meyer, who died of a brain tumour at age six; her father recorded her struggle and the community proposed adding her favourite colour to the CSS standard, which was eventually accepted.

The new logo is available in dark and light variants and has been uploaded to GitHub at https://github.com/CSS-Next/logo.css, offering formats such as AVIF, SVG, WebP, PNG and JPEG.

Images illustrating the history and the new logo are shown below.