1 The name
Berglet
A berg with the small-thing ending -let: a little iceberg. The part you see is small and friendly. Most of it is under the waterline, and it's there whether or not you ever look.
It is two syllables, spelled the way it sounds, means nothing rude that we could find, and isn't about retro, code or school. It takes a plural and a suffix without complaint:
- “I made a game for Berglet.”
- “Put the Berglets back in the dock.”
- Berglet Studio · Berglet Dock · Berglet Classroom · Berglet SDK · Berglet Games
A working name. It lives in one line of the site's configuration and can be changed in a minute. The symbol was designed not to depend on it.
2 The idea
Four bands, deeper each time
The symbol is the console's outline, upright with soft corners, cut into four bands that get taller as they go down: Play, Make, Learn, Go deeper. The top band is the only one in colour. It's the tip: the part everyone sees.
It isn't a controller, a chip, a bracket or a pixel. It is a shape that can come to mean this object by being on it.
3 Roads not taken
Three directions were drawn.
A · Bands (chosen)
B · The iceberg
C · The hole
A · Bands
Says “layers” and “more below than above” with four rectangles. Survives being moulded, laser-marked, printed in one colour, and shrunk to two bands. Doesn't depend on the name. Chosen.
B · The iceberg
The metaphor drawn literally. Reads as cold, as a warning sign, and as a climate charity. The facets turn to mush at 5 mm.
C · The hole
A thing you want to look into, which is the right feeling. But it reads as a camera or a speaker, and it says nothing about depth having an order.
5 Using it
Rules, briefly
- Clear space: leave the height of the top band plus one gap on every side of the symbol. For the lock-up, the width of the letter l's stem times three.
- Smallest sizes: symbol 10 mm or 28 px tall. Below that, the small symbol, down to 5 mm or 14 px. Lock-up 18 mm or 90 px wide.
- On the device: the small symbol, one colour, moulded or laser-marked; 6 to 8 mm tall. Gaps never thinner than 0.5 mm.
- Colour: the top band is the only place the orange goes inside the logo. One-colour versions are for one-colour processes, not for taste.
- Don't stretch it, round the cuts, reorder the bands, add a fifth, outline it, or put it on a busy photo.
6 Colour
- Paper
#F4F0E6 - Shell white
#FFFDF8 - Ink
#14120F - Button orange
#FF4A1C - Star
#FFC83A - −1 Shallow
#CFDDFB - −2 Cobalt
#2A3FE5 - −3 Navy
#141B6E - −4 Abyss
#070919
A white object with orange buttons, on paper. The blues are depth and appear in order, as flat bands, never as a gradient. Orange text on paper uses the darker #B92F08 so it can be read.
7 Type
Play. Make. Learn.
Bricolage Grotesque, 800 for headlines, 400 for reading. A grotesque with slightly odd joints: friendly at a glance, a bit strange up close. SIL Open Font Licence 1.1.
ship.x = ship.x + 2
−4.2 THE TRANSLATORS
Martian Mono for code, measurements and depth marks. Wide, sturdy, legible at 11 px. SIL Open Font Licence 1.1.
8 Voice
Say what the thing is.
Short sentences. Real numbers. Dry rather than excited. Written so a ten-year-old isn't talked down to and an engineer isn't sold to.
Like this
- A tiny game console you can program.
- You type, you save, the game changes.
- Battery life: not measured.
- It works; there is a diode involved.
- Mistakes are explained in sentences.
Not like this
- Unleash your creativity with next-gen retro power!
- A seamless, AI-ready STEM learning ecosystem.
- All-day battery life.*
- EXTREME 240 MHz dual-core performance.
- Coding made fun for kids!
9 Where it goes
- Boot screen
- Black. The four bands drop into place from the top, orange first, then the name. Under a second and a half. No sound required.
- The console
- The small symbol on the back, one colour, in the plastic. No name on the front: the front is for the screen and the buttons.
- Berglet Studio
- The symbol in the corner, paper or ink background to match the editor's theme, orange only for the one button that matters: Update. Depth blues stay on the website.
- Packaging
- A plain paper-coloured box the size of the console plus a finger. Outside: the symbol and the tagline. Inside the lid, where you only see it after opening: “Simple until you become curious.”
- Berglet Dock
- White, one orange detail. Each slot is marked with the small symbol, so the bands on the dock line up with the bands on the consoles' backs.
- Classroom & docs
- Paper background, ink text, the depth numbers (−1 to −4) as a wayfinding system for how advanced a page is.
Packaging and the dock are design intent. Neither exists.
10 Press
If you're writing about it
One line: Berglet is the pocket game console you can make games for.
A paragraph: Berglet is a handheld game console that fits in your palm. You can play on it, make your own games for it in Lua or Python from any browser with nothing to install, and send them to a friend's console nearby. Underneath, it is an open little computer: games can also be written in C or WebAssembly, and its players for classic game files load from the memory card.
Price and availability haven't been announced, so please don't quote either. Use the renders and drawings here rather than inventing a product photo.
Press contact: hello@berglet.com