The Docker company was started in France in 2010, but the Docker software was released as open source only in March 2013. In its official blog, the company states that the original logotype was “put together quickly”, so they decided to upgrade the logo and visual style shortly after.
What is Docker?
Docker is the set of PaaS products, created by Solomon Hykes in 2013. The software was built to make the building and managing processes of applications easier and faster.
The current Docker logo was introduced in June 2013. With the help of the freelancer community 99designs the company received 84 logo prototypes. The winner was the whale emblem created by Ricky Asamanis, a graphic designer from Indonesia.
The whale carrying a stack of containers symbolizes the company’s four core values: expedition, automation, encapsulation, and simplification.
In 2015, they simply moved the wordmark from beneath the emblem to its right, and that’s all.
The word for the 2017 emblem is minimalism. They basically turned the emblem into a shape of a whale with several squares piled up on it – all colored a deep blue color. The wordmark also adopted this color, although the letters were also marginally changed in some places.
The lowercase Docker logotype looks playful and friendly, using a rounded sans-serif typeface with rounded shapes of the letters. The font, closest to the one used in the inscription from the software’s insignia is, probably, Modulus Pro Semi Bold, but with the shape of the letter “R” modified.
Like many other companies, connected to the IT and tech industry, Docker chooses a bright and vivid shade of blue for its logo, to represent professionalism and reliability. The blue also makes sense in connection to the sea-themed emblem of the brand.