The Kern logo, in every form anyone needs it — and the rules for using it.
Kern is one application for a team's whole day. This repository holds its logo, and the rules for
writing about it. If you are writing about Kern, building an integration, or listing it somewhere,
take the files from here rather than screenshotting them — and take the words from
docs/voice.md, which carries the boilerplate, the pitches and the spelling of
every name.
Download everything · or clone
the repository · or hotlink a single file from raw.githubusercontent.com.
Take the SVG unless something cannot accept one. It is sharp at every size and a fraction of the weight.
| File | Use it |
|---|---|
svg/kern-lockup.svg |
The mark and the word together, on a light background. Start here. |
svg/kern-lockup-dark.svg |
The same, on a dark background |
svg/kern-mark.svg |
The mark alone, on a light background — an avatar, an app icon, a favicon |
svg/kern-mark-dark.svg |
The mark alone, on a dark background |
svg/kern-mark-outline.svg |
The mark on a light background that needs an edge to sit against |
svg/kern-mark-mono.svg |
One colour, inherits currentColor — for inlining in HTML |
svg/kern-mark-mono-ink.svg |
One colour, fixed to ink, for anything that cannot set a colour |
svg/kern-mark-mono-paper.svg |
One colour, fixed to paper |
favicon.ico |
32px, for a browser that still asks for one |
PNGs of all of the above are in png/, with transparent corners so they sit on any background:
marks at 1024, 512, 256, 128, 64 and 32; lockups at 2400, 1200, 600 and 300 wide.
| Hex | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ink | #1C1A17 |
the square, and the letter on a light ground |
| Paper | #FBFAF7 |
the letter on a dark ground |
| Accent | #B4661C |
the tick, and nothing else |
These are the product's own tokens, not separate brand colours. The mark uses no others.
Keep clear space of at least the width of the tick on every side — 9 units of the 144 grid, so 6.25% of the mark's width. Nothing sits inside that: no text, no rule, no edge of a card.
The mark reads down to 16px. Below that, use a single letter, not a shrunken logo. The lockup reads down to 90px wide; below that, use the mark alone.
- Put the mark on ink, on paper, or on a photograph quiet enough to keep it legible.
- Scale it. It is vector artwork; there is no size that is too large.
- Use the monochrome file when you have one colour to spend — engraving, embroidery, a single-colour print — rather than flattening a coloured one.
- Say "Kern" in your own body text. You do not need the logo to mention us.
- Recolour it. The three colours above are the whole palette.
- Stretch, squash, rotate, outline, or add a shadow, gradient or glow.
- Rebuild the square with a different corner radius, or set the K in a font — the letterforms here
are outlines, and re-setting them gives you a different letter. See
docs/geometry.md. - Put it on a busy background, or on a colour close to
#1C1A17where the square disappears. - Use it as your own app icon, or in a way that suggests Kern endorses, sponsors or built your product. "Works with Kern" is fine. A Kern logo where your logo goes is not.
- Alter it and keep calling it the Kern logo.
The mark is half of it. docs/voice.md is the other half: how Kern sounds, what it
is allowed to claim about itself, and how its own names are spelled.
Quote the boilerplate and the pitches there as they stand. Kern is pre-1.0, so check any feature claim against the status table in the README before it goes out beside them.
The artwork is licensed CC BY-ND 4.0 — copy and redistribute it in any medium, for any purpose including commercially, provided you do not distribute a modified version.
That licence covers copyright. It does not grant rights in the trademark: "Kern" and the Kern logo are marks of the Kern project. Use them to refer to Kern. Do not use them as your own brand, or in any way likely to confuse people about who made what. See TRADEMARK.md.
Deliberately not AGPL-3.0, which is the licence for every other KernAIO repository. AGPL is a software licence; applied to a logo it would invite people to modify the mark and redistribute it under the same name, which is the one thing a trademark exists to prevent.
The SVGs in svg/ are the masters. Everything else is generated:
pnpm install
pnpm build # rewrites png/, favicon.ico and the colour-fixed monochrome SVGsCI runs pnpm check, which is the same build followed by git diff --exit-code — so a PNG can
never quietly stop matching the SVG it came from.
docs/geometry.md records how the mark is constructed, down to the number, for anyone who has to
rebuild it in a context that cannot take an SVG.
The mark is embedded directly in the surfaces that draw it, rather than fetched from here, because
those repositories build standalone. docs/geometry.md lists every one of them; change the mark and
they all change together.
Kern itself is at KernAIO/app — one place for your team's work, open source and self-hostable. AGPL-3.0.