What Is the Blender Logo?
The Blender logo is a circle with a dot inside it, held by three curved strokes, often read as an eye inside an orbit. The full-colour logo uses orange and blue, and dark and light versions also exist. Blender is the free, open-source 3D creation software of the Blender Foundation, the nonprofit set up in May 2002; the program itself was born at the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo, where its first source files were written on 2 January 1994.
The black symbol is available as the Blender logo SVG.
Blender Logo Facts
| Symbol | A circle with a dot inside, held by three curved strokes |
| Logo type | Abstract mark: a geometric symbol |
| Owner | Blender Foundation |
What the Blender Logo Means
The Blender Foundation's own logo page lists the colours and variants but gives no official explanation of the shape. It is often read as an eye, with the dot as the pupil and the curved strokes circling it like an orbit, a fitting picture for software used to model, light and render what a camera sees. The same reading has been given to a Blender icon from 1998. The logo page also lists versions "with socket" and "without socket".
The name comes from music rather than graphics. Blender is named after a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from their album Baby, which NeoGeo used in its showreel.
Blender Logo History
Ton Roosendaal founded NeoGeo in 1989, and Blender began as the studio's in-house tool. Version 1.0 followed in January 1995, running on Silicon Graphics workstations. An early Blender icon survives from the NeoGeo years: a vector file named blenderex.fti, dated 15 June 1998, found among NeoGeo's Silicon Graphics files. Piotr Zgodziński, who has researched Blender's early history, describes it as an eye with eyelashes up top.
In June 1998 Roosendaal opened Not a Number (NaN) to develop and sell Blender, but the company closed in early 2002. In May 2002 he started the Blender Foundation, and in July its Free Blender campaign raised €110,000 in seven weeks to make Blender open source. Blender was released under the GNU General Public License on 13 October 2002.
The foundation's logo page notes that the logo has changed a lot over the years. The Blender Institute followed in summer 2007, producing open movies such as Big Buck Bunny (2008), Tears of Steel (2012), Spring (2019) and Sprite Fright (2021). Blender 2.8 was released in July 2019.
For more brands like Blender, browse our tech logos.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Blender logo represent?
The Blender Foundation has not published an official meaning; the shape is most often read as an eye inside an orbit.
Where does the name Blender come from?
From a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, which the Dutch studio NeoGeo used in its showreel.
What colours are in the Blender logo?
The full-colour logo combines orange and blue, and the foundation also offers dark and light versions.
When did Blender become free software?
On 13 October 2002, after the Free Blender campaign raised €110,000 to release the code under the GNU General Public License.