GitHub logo PNG

GitHub's mark started as a stock illustration. In 2008, illustrator Simon Oxley sold a cat-human hybrid clip-art character called "Cognition" through iStockphoto; GitHub licensed it, swapped the arms and legs for tentacles, and the result became the Octocat — equal parts cat and cephalopod, and the closest thing GitHub has to a mascot. The flat black silhouette version of that mark — no color, no shading, just the cat-and-tentacles outline — is what GitHub actually ships as its logo and app icon, and it's commonly called the Invertocat in GitHub's own brand guidelines. A github logo png search is almost always after this flat silhouette, not the full illustrated Octocat artwork that shows up in blog posts and merchandise.

"github icon" and "github logo" point to the same file here, which is worth saying plainly since people search both expecting different things. GitHub's brand guidelines do include a separate text logotype — the word "GitHub" set in a custom monospace-style face — but Simple Icons, the source for every glyph on this site, only provides the Octocat mark, not the wordmark. So a github icon png, a git hub logo, or a github symbol download are all the same Invertocat silhouette at whatever size and color you pick; there's no separate "icon" cropped down from a bigger logo the way there sometimes is for other brands.

Unlike Instagram's pink or Facebook's blue, GitHub doesn't really have a brand color for this mark — it's solid black (hex #181717, close enough to true black that most screens won't show the difference) on a light background, and white on dark. That's why the "original color" file on this page is effectively identical to the black variant: GitHub's own interface uses the same two-tone logic, swapping to the white Invertocat whenever the UI goes into dark mode. If you're placing the logo on a dark header, sidebar, or dark-mode screenshot, grab the white variant rather than fighting legibility with the black one.

Every size here exports with a transparent background by default, so a github logo png transparent download drops straight into a README banner, a slide, or a dark UI without a white box around the cat silhouette. PNG comes in five fixed sizes, 64 to 1024px — 64 or 128px covers a favicon or a small UI badge, 512px is the usual pick for a repo banner or app listing, and 1024px is the largest fixed export. Past that, or for print at a size you don't know yet, the SVG is the safer download: it's vector, so it scales without the blur a stretched PNG gets once you're past its native resolution.

If you've landed here searching for a github icon svg, a github svg icon, or just a github logo vector file, it's the same file as the PNG, just in vector form — one flat-color Invertocat silhouette with no embedded raster pixels. SVG is the better pick any time the size isn't fixed in advance: a repo badge that needs to scale with viewport width, a print run, or a favicon set generated from a single source file. For a fixed placement at a known pixel size, the PNG is simpler and doesn't need any extra tooling to drop into a page.

A github logo text copy search is usually after a shortcut to the raw markup rather than a file to save — exactly what the "Copy SVG code" button above does: it copies the selected variant's SVG source straight to your clipboard, ready to paste directly into HTML, a README, or a design tool's code panel without downloading anything first.

One thing worth knowing before using any github logo image commercially: the artwork file itself is CC0-licensed through Simple Icons, but the GitHub name and the Octocat/Invertocat mark remain GitHub's trademark. That's fine for identification — linking to a repository, listing it among other dev-tool icons — but implying a partnership or endorsement you don't have crosses into trademark territory, and GitHub's own brand guidelines are stricter than most about altering the mark's proportions or color. The usage guidelines page has the full breakdown if you're using it for anything beyond identification.