Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

An Official* Logo for HTML

Stacked paintbrushes of various bright colors drying.
February 19, 2026

*Not official.

I was working on my slide deck for the upcoming State of the Browser conference and ran into what I would classify as a recurring issue: HTML needs a logo. There isn’t a broadly accepted official logo for (version-independent) HTML. There is a logo for HTML 5, but that versioned marketing term has long fallen out of regular use (and was introduced 18 years ago).

This is a community solved problem in both the CSS and JavaScript spaces!

I wish the classic orange badge hadn’t included a version number, but alas.

Anyway, I very quickly threw my hat into the ring and immediately recognized a much better option from Sam Stephenson sls.name that I’ll be considering canon moving forward (and hopefully this blog post puts some weight behind it for others too).

Here’s what it looks like rendered in your web browser:

I love the nod to the classic unvisited link color and the heavy outset border that doubles as angle brackets with the right head tilt.

If you’re interested in the source code, the HTML-only (copy-paste friendly) source code is included below (and also on Codepen):

<a href="https://indieweb.social/@sstephenson/116098428280403793" style="all:initial;cursor:pointer;font-size:2rem;width:4em;height:4em;color:blue;text-decoration:underline;display:flex;align-items:center;justify-content:center;background:#ccc;border:.5em outset #aaa;font-weight:900;">HTML</a>

IndieWeb Avatar for https://unsplash.com/Poster image by RhondaK

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, State of the Browser, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »