• The journey
  • Bees, and more bees
  • Bee smokers
• Hannah the Honeyguide

At last, bpftool has a logo! But finding the right one was a long process.

The journey

I have thought about a logo for bpftool for a while. Something that would accurately represent the tool, and its relationship with BPF objects. I’m decently creative, and I don’t lack ideas; I’ve just been struggling to find the idea, the one that passes the bar that I mentally set. And I know how to fiddle with Inkscape, but I’ve got poor design skills, and I’m usually terrible when it comes to drawing.

So I’ve explored various ideas, and lucky you! You get to see what bpftool got away with.

Bees, and more bees

Given that bpftool is related to eBPF, the logo has to represent some kind of bee, of course. So I started with stylised bees, first as some sort of ribbon:

But it turned out to be very limited by my skills at drawing nice-looking ribbons. I tried another variant more in the shape of a helix, but I didn’t go beyond the stage of a rough sketch for this one:

Then I got an Idea, a good one. As bpftool is, well, a tool, the logo should probably reflect that. What if the bee was also a Swiss-army knife, just like bpftool is sort of a Swiss-army knife for managing eBPF objects? I came up with something decent:

And I think the next iteration was actually rather nice (don’t mind the typeset “bpftool” underneath, the colour and font were just a test). I have the honour to introduce you to the Swiss-army knife bee, Pikachu variant!

I really considered using this one for a time. I kept it in the drawer for a while because I hoped it would receive some improvements from a designer, except it turned out the project ended up with a priority too low in their list of tasks. I’m also unsure how similar to a Pokémon you can make your logo before you get into troubles for copyright infringement.

Trivia: You can observe the improvement on the colour gradient on the wings between the two versions. This was just before I discovered that mesh gradients, that I used in Inkscape for the second version, are not part of the SVG standard and are not supported yet in browsers, so the original SVG would display with completely transparent wings.

Bee smokers

After considering the Swiss-army knives for a while, I thought of something else. What if we picked a logo that was not a bee? There are many variants of bees in eBPF-related projects already, so why not use something different, for a change? After all, bpftool is not a project based on eBPF in the sense that it would use eBPF for the binary to work¹, so maybe it shouldn’t be an eBPF bee itself. Instead, it could be something that we use to work with bees.

… Wait, what do we use to work with bees?

One answer came to mind: when harvesting honey, beekeepers use smokers in order to mask the pheromones from the bees and to prevent them from attacking all at once. Can a bee smoker make a nice logo? Yes! And no. I mean, it probably can. You just need more skills than I have, I suppose.

Let’s be honest: the first draft was, huh, very bad.

As a colleague kindly commented, it looked like a fart. Okay, so let’s move on to some other versions of the smoke, just the smoke, without the tool this time:

Or another one:

The two logos above are colourful, but they don’t really depict smoke well, they look more like clouds. Could someone understand, just by seeing them, that they relate to the smoke used to tame the bees? Very unlikely. We need the smoker itself to be apparent. Hence a new version:

The smoke looks better, but the smoker is not recognisable. Let’s make it smaller so we can fit more of it in the frame:

Probably not the worst thing we could think of, but I was still not convinced by the result. The thickness of the lines is not balanced between the smoker and its smoke. Or are there too many details? But removing them would make the smoker hard to recognise… Anyway, do we really want smoke on the logo? It’s a mean to disturb the normal behaviour of the bees, it’s not healthy, and it’s not environment-friendly. Perhaps not the right image we need, after all.

See how far we’ve come! Ribbon bees, Swiss-army knives, Pokémons, and bee smokers. None of them satisfying. However, I got some new inspiration and found something that I really like. By some miracle, I even managed to draw something that (I think) looks great. Here comes the official logo for bpftool, at last!

Hannah the Honeyguide

Meet Hannah the Honeyguide, bpftool’s mascot. She is a greater honeyguide, but a juvenile one, as can be seen from her yellow throat. We accentuated her shades, because Hannah really wanted to share colors with eBee and Tux (the mascots for eBPF and Linux, respectively).

Living in sub-Saharan Africa, greater honeyguides are known for guiding humans to the nests of wild bees. They use a specific call to attract human attention, then they fly towards the hive. Once the honey hunters have found and harvested the nest, greater honeyguides feed on the remnants of the hive, eating bee eggs and larvae, and even beeswax.

Like a honeyguide, bpftool guides humans towards bees, or to be more accurate, towards BPF objects loaded on a system: after all, one of the primary use cases for bpftool is to load and inspect BPF programs and maps. Don’t worry, bpftool will not eat your programs. Although, it could well detach programs and have them removed from the kernel, if you asked it to. Of course, bpftool is a piece of software and cannot “expect” to receive something in return for its services. But think of it this way: for guiding humans to BPF, it feeds on software maintenance and new features. Isn’t that some form of mutualism, after all?

Greater honeyguides are also brood parasites: the females lay their eggs in the nests of birds of different species, and the chicks attempt to get rid of any competitors as soon as they hatch. Thankfully, Hannah chose not to fight at birth. As for bpftool? Shhhh, we may well have placed it in a particular penguin’s nest, so it could thrive. But we’re happy to report that bpftool never pushed any other project out of the Linux repository!

Other variants of the logo (horizontal, icon only, monochrome) are available on the GitHub mirror repository.

All variants for the logo are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). Reuse them as you want, but please credit the bpftool authors. The font used to typeset “bpftool” is Raleway.

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