GitHub Brand Refactor

2026

GitHub has annual brand refreshes—an end to end auditing and designing process to keep things cohesive, culturally relevant, and aligned to changing business initiatives. For 2026 we evolved some of the foundational primitives: color, logo, type, and layout.

Me, Kyle

Design

Eleena Bakrie

Illustration

Brooks Chambers

Direction

Marcus Bakke

Illustration

Jesus Andreas

Site Design

Lisa Adang

Project Management

Updated Logo

Mona's head got a little more circular, less boxy. The vectors transition better, are less tense overall. A subtle curve inflection and slightly bigger arm support a more tentacle-like feeling creates better overall symmetry.

Old (2015-2025)

New (2026+)

Expanding Mona Sans

I added optical sizes and monospace styles to Mona Sans' already large design space. This allowed me to redraw and space characters to suit their size.

Layout system

The layout system split visuals into clean halfs or thirds. Each side represented the two parts of GitHub's offering: creative, infrastructure. The layout side was legible, grided, seperate. The illustration side was creative, dimensional, expressive.

I’m a brand designer in Oakland, CA. If I'm not baking or reading, you’ll find me at Savers. I run Very Cool Studio, work as a brand designer at GitHub, and run Song Club Records.

In my experience, design is what it does. Designers (me, Kyle) have the tendency to fall in love with the conveyor belt. And as we all fall in love with the clean doingness of AI, it has become more and more important to ask “okay but what does it do.” Design is the opinion-making process for answering that question. I sorta think this is what trust the process means. At the start of every project I’m a little dumb—at the end I’ll be a little smarter. If I’m doing my job right, the work will be a little more than me—kinder, smarter, more true to its purpose—leaving me in my state of stupor for the next project.

And maybe because I see myself as a little dumb, I think of most design problems as interpersonal problems. I still haven’t found a good enough idea, a plan so god-tier that it’s self-convincing. And the subjectivities that get in the way of those smart plans are only a problem because we say so.

If you made it this far, let's talk — that's the interpersonal part.

Category	Link
Social	Very Cool Studio Instagram Bluesky Substack
Colophon	Font is VC Nudge SemiNormal Hosted on GitHub Pages Built on Jekyll with tailwind
Contact	hello@verycoolstudio.com