Fly your own burgee

A burgee is the small swallowtail flag a boat flies to say which club or fleet it belongs to. Ours is on this page's tab. Yours takes one command.

This is not a template we copied for you. burgee/brand is the same module that generates every identity surface on this site, and it is published as part of the package, so your flag and ours are drawn by one implementation.

One command

npx burgee-brand --lead '#5b21b6' --follow '#0ea5e9' --name acme --out ./brand

Six files land in ./brand: flag.svg, icon.svg (a favicon master), og.svg (1200×630, what every crawler crops to), cover.svg (1000×420, the dev.to ratio), and a nav lockup in dark and light.

--tagline sets the line under your name on the card and cover. --bordure adds a hairline outline. --charge points at an SVG whose contents replace the two bars with your own glyph, drawn in a 0 0 100 100 box:

npx burgee-brand --lead '#5b21b6' --follow '#0ea5e9' \
  --charge ./glyph.svg --bordure '#e8dcc8' --out ./brand

It is a burgee command like any other, so --json gives you the file list as a stable envelope, and a missing flag exits 2 with the flag that fixes it. Drive it from a script without parsing prose.

Or from code

import { defineBurgee, opposedField } from 'burgee/brand';

const brand = defineBurgee({
  name: 'acme',
  mark: { lead: '#5b21b6', follow: '#0ea5e9' },
  field: opposedField({ lead: '#5b21b6', follow: '#0ea5e9' }),
});

writeFileSync('icon.svg', brand.favicon());

defineBurgee takes the field as explicit gradient stops if you want them. opposedField is the default worth understanding before you replace it.

Two decisions the generator makes for you

The field runs backwards. Your leading colour goes at the far end of the gradient, so the leading half of the charge sits against the following colour and the reverse. Each half of your mark lands on its opposite. That tension is the whole reason the flag reads as one object rather than a logo on a rectangle.

It passes through a dark midpoint. This is not styling. The charge sits at the flag's centre, and two saturated colours of similar weight cannot be told apart — ours measure 1.16:1 against each other, which is invisible. Dropping the field to near-black exactly where the charge sits lifts them to 3.50:1 and 3.02:1, clearing the 3:1 floor WCAG sets for a graphical object. Move it with --ground if your pair needs a different value; remove it and your mark will disappear into your own flag.

The same reasoning applies to whatever you put the flag on: a card ground at or near the field's dark stop dissolves the middle of the flag and leaves two floating triangles. Ours are held clear of it deliberately.

Fly it, then send it back

If you build a CLI on burgee and make a burgee for it, open a pull request adding it to the fleet. One flag, its two colours, and a link to the CLI. A burgee says which fleet a boat belongs to, and a fleet you cannot see the other boats in is not much of one.