The branding of HTML 5 is upon us. Logo designer Michael Nieling came up with an html 5 logo that someone inexplicably asked for. It also has its own website. Like your mom’s cat has his own Facebook page. The logo is good and it will work as a mark on any background, scaled as big or as small as you would need and looks great in black and white. The palette used is trendy and why not? HTML 6 is on the way, I suppose in some engineer’s nerd-dreams, nestled between Big Bang Theory Fan-fic and Olivia Munn. I especially like this logo for what it doesn’t try to do. It doesn’t attempt to speak to what html 5 promises for the future, or how it will transform the user experience, or any of that silliness. Just an orange shield with an S on it. I mean a 5. It’s a 5.

As always, what I really like about a big, goofy logo roll out is the marketing gibberish language that is attached to it. I remember Pepsi’s latest logo redesign came with a bewildering 15 page explanation of the process that was at once hilarious and yet totally acceptable. If you spend that amount of time and money, you need to show and tell. So, take a pull on this:

“It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write. It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It’s the standard’s standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn’t use tables for layout.”

I felt like Thor when I read that. Funny though, the developers I know would not be described as “shiny”. Our new developer’s shirt could be described that way, however. Clearly, this is tongue in cheek and whoever wrote it has a pretty good sense of the absurdity of these puffy, cringe-inducing logo mission statements as descriptions. At least I hope so.

The classes’ logos are a little less successful at least for me, but there is a definite cohesive suite here.

So there you have it. One big bold logo perfect for branding and a bunch of odd supporting logos that serve little purpose really. I give the whole set high marks and am a fan. Let us know what you think and feel free to send me a logo shirt (they actually sell for 22 bucks on the site). Ladies medium, thanks.