The mark, the colours and the name

Everything needed to show Pilots somewhere other than this site. The mark as files, the rules that keep it legible, the palette, the type, and how the name is written.

Download the mark Usage

The mark

Shown on deep ink and on warm paper, because a drawing tuned against black often goes muddy when it is inverted. The strip underneath is the same drawing at the sizes a favicon and an avatar render at, which is where most marks fall apart.

Delta

32px 24px 20px 16px

The aircraft symbol off a moving map, swept back and leaning forward. It carries motion in the drawing itself, and the band cut through it is the one feature no other triangle has.

What may not change. An upward triangle sits close to a play button, and the lean and the cut are the only things holding the two apart. Neither may be dropped at small sizes.

Mark, ink pilots-mark-ink.svg

The default. Dark ink with no background of its own, for paper, white, and any light surface.
Mark, paper pilots-mark-paper.svg

The same drawing in light ink, for dark surfaces, slides and terminals.
Both are vector files with the band cut out for real, so they need no background and scale to any size. There is no file for the word, because the word is set in type.

Clear space and the smallest size

Keep a quarter of the mark clear on every side

The dashed line is the edge nothing else may cross, and the inner box is the mark's own. Text, other logos and the edge of a card all stay outside the dashed line. The header on this site follows the same rule.

Sixteen pixels is the floor

At that size the band is a single pixel tall. Any smaller and it closes up, and a leaning triangle without its cut reads as a play button. Where the space is smaller than that, write the name instead.

Leave the drawing alone

No outline, shadow, rotation or stretch, and no straightening of the lean. One ink colour at a time, which is either of the two in the files or the ink of the surface it sits on.

In a square or a circle

For avatars, favicons, app icons, badges and a row of other companies' logos: anywhere the mark sits centred in a frame of its own. The favicon of this site is the reference.

Centre the weight, not the box

The lean throws the apex right and the left foot out to the edge, so a mark centred by its bounding box carries its weight right of centre and looks shifted right, over an empty top-left corner. Put the ink's centre of mass on the frame's vertical centre line instead. The left margin comes out smaller than the right, and it must stay that way.

Vertically, go only half way

The centre of mass sits low, because the feet are wide and the apex is a point. Moved all the way, the apex touches the top edge: a point carries almost no weight but still sets the margin. So the mark moves half way from its box centre to its centre of mass.

The numbers

On the mark's 32-unit grid, the point that goes on the frame's centre is x 18, y 16.56 (the box centre is x 16, y 15.7). In a square tile, scale the mark to 0.88 of the tile, as the favicon does. In a circle, scale it about the same point until the apex and the left foot clear the round edge, about 0.8. Move and scale only: the drawing itself never changes.

Colour

Neutrals carry everything. The green is rationed to the primary action and to live state, and it never tints a panel, never colours a heading, and never appears as a gradient. Each value is given for the light theme first and the dark theme second.

paper the page #f7f4ee #0e1014
paper-elev panels and cards #fffdf9 #15181e
ink text and the mark #16181c #e9e7e1
ink-muted body prose #54585f #9ba1ac
ink-subtle captions and labels #80858e #6b7280
rule hairlines and borders #ddd7ca #232830
signal the one accent #a3e635 #b9f227
alert errors only #d6482f #ff7a5c

Type

From sandbox to production, on the same URL.

Headings and prose are the reader's own system sans, bold for headings with the tracking pulled in. No font is downloaded, so the page has its type before the first byte of anything else arrives.

pilot exec

The system monospace sets the name beside the mark, field labels, measured numbers and every terminal. It is the voice of the instrument panel, and it is kept for things a machine would print.

Writing the name

Beside the mark the name is set in the monospace at semibold, lowercase, at the size shown in the header below. In a sentence it is Pilots, with a capital and in no special type.

pilots GitHub

Pilots: use; In a sentence, a heading or a title. It is a product name and takes a capital like any other.
pilots: use; Only as the wordmark beside the mark, and wherever it is typed, such as a package name or an address.
pilot: use; The command line tool, and only that. The platform is plural.
PILOTS: avoid; It is a word and it is never set as an acronym.
Pilot: avoid; The singular is the command, which is always lowercase.

Using the mark

Use the mark and the name freely to refer to Pilots. That covers an article, a talk, a comparison, documentation for an integration, and a note that something runs on it. Nobody needs to ask for any of those.

Ask first before using the name or the mark as part of another product's name or logo, on merchandise, or in any way that suggests Pilots endorses something.