The Barcamp Logo

Who Made the Logo?

The barcamp logo was designed by Eris Stassi, one of the six co-founders of BarCamp. In a 2019 podcast interview, she recalled creating it at the Socialtext office the morning of and day before the event: "I wouldn't even say there were sketches. This is probably one of my fastest pieces of work, which is surprising how ubiquitous it has become." Chris Messina vectorized the design, and both versions, black on white and white on black, were uploaded to Flickr on August 17, 2005, two days before the first BarCamp opened in Palo Alto.

Messina credited the logo directly in a blog post on August 18, 2005: "We've got a fabulous logo (thanks Eris!)." On Flickr, where he published it under his factoryjoe account, the description reads: "Logo design by Eris Free. Vectorized by me!"

What the Logo Shows

The logo shows a stylized flame topped with Wi-Fi signal arcs. The word "BAR" appears above and "CAMP" below. Eris Stassi herself described the logo as having two parts: "the spark, which is represented by the fire, and the signal, which is represented by the Wi-Fi node. And they both provide a cohesive visual representation of what BarCamp aspires to be, which is a source of creativity and connection."

The campfire motif also captures the spirit of barcamp itself: a group of equals sitting in a circle, no stage, no podium, everyone facing each other. In Open Space Technology, the format barcamps borrow from, meetings begin and end in a circle. The logo reflects that.

Context: A Logo in Six Days

The logo was part of a larger scramble. The BarCamp founders started planning the event on August 13, 2005, and had to pull together a venue, sponsors, a wiki, and a visual identity all within six days. By August 17, they had the logo, and by August 19, the first BarCamp was underway at the offices of Socialtext in Palo Alto.

Eris Stassi is an experience designer who had been a panelist at SxSW Interactive 2005 and a contributor to publications like Communication Arts and Design in Flight. Before BarCamp, she had founded a similar knowledge-sharing organization in Texas, itself modeled on a skill-sharing club run by a design colleague in London. She brought that experience to the BarCamp planning meetings, helping shape what she called "the overall holistic mission and the statements." Her personal site, archived from 2006, shows someone deeply engaged with design as a craft. She was one of the group who met at the Ritual Roasters café in San Francisco on August 13 to plan the first BarCamp, and creating the logo was her contribution alongside organizing the event itself.

Chris Messina, who vectorized the original design, took the sketched logo and turned it into a clean vector file. His Flickr upload marks the logo as content type "Art/Drawing." A t-shirt version followed one day later. The logo was printed on shirts for the first event.

License

Both the white and black versions of the logo are published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). That means you can share and adapt the logo for non-commercial purposes, as long as you give credit and share any adapted work under the same license.

In practice, most local barcamps have created their own logos rather than reusing the original. The campfire motif often shows up in one form or another, but the specific design by Eris Stassi is primarily the logo for the original 2005 BarCamp and the barcamp.org wiki.

The "NonCommercial" clause deserves particular attention. If you run barcamps as a business, say if organizing them is a significant source of income or if entry fees go well beyond covering costs, using this logo likely falls outside the license terms. Stassi herself addressed this in 2019: "If you are worried that asking for operational costs or snack money at your event negates the copyright on the logo, I think you're already worried about the right things." She added that the bigger question is whether seed funding can be raised "in a way that doesn't exclude economically vulnerable people from participating." If there is any doubt about a more clearly commercial setup, design your own.

Local Barcamps and Their Own Logos

There is no central licensing authority or brand police for barcamps. The movement has always been decentralized, and that extends to visual identity. Most local barcamps design their own logo, often incorporating their city name or local references. Some keep the flame motif. Others go in a completely different direction.

What ties them together is the name and the format, not the logo. The campfire mark from 2005 is a piece of barcamp history, not a franchise trademark.

Sources

The claims on this page are based on the following primary sources. All were verified in March 2026.

• Eris Stassi, "How did you invent the flame logo at the very first barcamp?" (podcast interview), December 5, 2019. The logo designer herself talks about the origin of the campfire motif, the short preparation time, and the license situation. Interviewed by Jöran Muuß-Merholz for JRA episode 100. joeran.de/eris-stassi-barcamp
• Flickr, "Bar camp logo in white" by Chris Messina (factoryjoe), uploaded August 17, 2005. Description: "Logo design by Eris Free. Vectorized by me!" License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/34924369
• Chris Messina, "Bar camp buzz builds" (blog post), August 18, 2005. Contains the quote: "We've got a fabulous logo (thanks Eris!)." factoryjoe.com/2005/08/18/bar-camp-buzz-builds
• BarCamp Wiki, BarCampFounders, last edited by Chris Messina. Lists her as co-founder (under her earlier name Eris Free). barcamp.org/BarCampFounders (archived)
• Eris Stassi, erisfree.com (archived, 2006). Designer portfolio confirming her background. erisfree.com (archived)