Every page on the site now ends its header with the same two-button compass, in the same place, in the same order — and it is no longer maintained by hand:
Two same-size buttons, side by side.← BACK TO THE COCKPIT with (MAIN MENU) chalked underneath leads on the left; RETURN TO BASE with (Newest Post) underneath follows — one hop to the game, one to the newest journal entry, from any page on the site.
Consistent everywhere, 203 pages. Flight Log home, all 124 entry pages, every tag page, the store, the assets quartermaster, the print bay and all 37 model pages, and the analytics dashboard — same block, same position: the last element of the header.
A template, not a habit. The block and the shared Hornet Bay chrome (fonts, sizes, palette, banner, brand, logbrand) now live in one canonical source — site_header.py — served to every page through the new shared /css/site.css. The journal generator and the print-page generator embed it at birth, and a drift-guard script (site_sync.py) re-stamps the whole fleet on demand. Any page created from here on arrives already in formation.
The laurel banner no longer flies only over the Flight Log — every deck of the ship wears it now, and every page dresses to the same line:
One banner, everywhere. The store, the free assets quartermaster, the 3D print bay (index and all 37 model pages), and the analytics dashboard all open with the laurel-and-Hornet header banner at full width.
One type scale. The 30px HORNET BAY brand mark, the 24px amber squadron subtitle, the 13px blurb, the 12px letterspaced nav — same fonts, same sizes, same Courier New mono stack, page to page.
One rail. Headers and content now run on the same 1120px measure site-wide, so nothing drifts as you move between decks.
One compass. Every page carries the same nav set — BACK TO THE COCKPIT, FLIGHT LOG, STORE, ASSETS, 3D PRINT BAY — and the last of the old “DEV JOURNAL” nameboards have been repainted FLIGHT LOG.
The Flight Log gets its colors sewn on: a full-width header banner built to the style guide. The golden laurel emblem holds the left under a soft amber glow; the HORNET BAY / FLIGHT LOG wordmark and the tribute line hold the center; and off the right wing flies the game's own F/A-18, posed to match the emblem exactly — rear-above three-quarter, twin nozzles to the viewer, nose to the lower-left, Sidewinders on the rails.
Same jet, same orientation. The banner Hornet is the actual gallery model, studio-lit and shot offscreen, then pixel-echoed so its facets rhyme with the wreath's Amiga pixel art.
Style-guide palette throughout. Deep navy field with faint stars, amber wordmark and rule, ink tagline — the same variables the journal and the game already wear.
Everywhere the log lives. The banner heads the journal home and every permalink page, and it came with a small header refit: search to the top right, military date-time groups on every entry, and tags tucked under the titles.
Row numbers retired. The main menu no longer prints a digit against each row — the list reads cleaner for it. The number keys themselves still work, if your fingers remember them.
Three rows struck. TRAINING: DEMO OF MANEUVERS, TRAINING: PRACTICE MANEUVERS and QUALIFICATION: REQUIRED FOR MISSIONS are removed from the menu.
Laurel refit. The Squadron Laurel roundel has been re-framed — the Hornet is zoomed out and centred so the whole airframe, wingtip missiles included, sits inside the ring with clear sky all round. The roundel file has been refreshed wherever the site serves it.
Hot on the heels of the emblem rebuild: the whole-Hornet laurel is now flying on all four Squadron Laurel products at The Exchange — mug, kiss-cut sticker, left-chest tee, and left-chest hoodie. The clipped-nose editions have been retired to the archives; same prices, same placements, complete airframe.
The lookbook got a fresh sitting too — new concept photography for the tee and the hoodie, roundel on the left chest where a patch belongs.
Sharp eyes on the flight line noticed the squadron laurel had its Hornet flying out of the frame — the radome was clipped where the source screenshot ended. No longer. The emblem has been rebuilt with the whole Hornet: full pointed nose, canopy, twin tails, wings and rails, all of it inside the laurel ring, over the new flat navy that lets the airframe stand out.
The jet is no illustration — it is the game’s own F/A-18 model, posed for the portrait. Two new capture hooks in the aircraft gallery made the sitting possible: the model can now be rolled into a bank for hero angles (?gr=), and a chroma-key backdrop (?chroma=) lifts it clean off the sky for cutout work. Same trick as the fleet orbits, one degree finer.
New insignia, four new ways to wear it. The Squadron Laurel — the Hornet over the starlit bay, wrapped in gold — now flies on a mug (printed front and back), a kiss-cut sticker, a tee, and a hoodie. On the clothing the laurel rides on the left chest, where a patch belongs — not splashed across the front like a billboard.
And because flat product renders only tell half the story, The Exchange now opens with a lookbook: the tee on the tarmac at golden hour, the hoodie on the dusk watch. Concept photography generated for the squadron — the exact print is always in the product renders below. That makes ten products on the shelf; coffee included.
Squadron stores are coming: hornetbay.com/store — The Exchange — is live today in preview mode with the planned catalog and target prices. The launch lineup: a navy dad cap with the embroidered insignia, all seven embroidered iron-on patches (Carrier Ops Certified plus the six reward badges — collect them all), an 11oz insignia mug, a sticker sheet with every badge, and a navy wordmark tee. Everything is printed on demand when ordered and shipped worldwide — nothing sits in a hangar; checkout, payment and sales taxes run through Fourthwall as merchant of record, so there’s no Shopify and no stockroom.
The whole store is built API-first. A new embroidery-safe variant of the insignia (five thread colors, flat grays) leads a production artwork pack; a product spec defines all eleven SKUs; and a setup script drives Fourthwall’s Platform API — artwork upload, product-template matching, mockup rendering, pricing as base cost plus margin — so the catalog is created by code, not an afternoon of clicking. The storefront page itself is custom headless: it will pull the live catalog from the Storefront API and hand buyers to hosted checkout, all without leaving hornetbay.com. The only missing piece is the shop account itself — once it’s connected, The Exchange flips from preview to open for business. Digital badges and wallpapers, as always, stay free at the quartermaster.
The Carrier Ops Certified insignia has company: a family of six reward badges has landed on the assets page, one for each milestone that matters in a naval aviator’s logbook. CAT LAUNCH QUALIFIED for your first ride on the cat. FIRST CARRIER LANDING for your first trap back aboard. FIRST BOGIE SPLASHED for your first confirmed kill — starring the enemy MiG-29 Fulcrum from the aircraft gallery, red stars and all. MOFFETT DEFENDER for splashing the cruise missile before it reaches the airfield, with a reticle on the roundel for good measure. NIGHT OWL for launching and recovering after dark, flown under a star-dotted cap. And FIVE KILL ACE, five amber stars under the Hornet, for the Bay’s finest.
Every patch follows the same design law as the insignia — amber ring, dusk-over-ocean roundel, arc text, and imagery captured from the game’s own models (the Fulcrum posed in the aircraft gallery for its close-up). Each comes as a 1200×1200 transparent master plus a 400×400 avatar cut, free at hornetbay.com/assets. Fly the sortie, earn the patch, post it.
There’s a new public page on the site: hornetbay.com/assets — the quartermaster, where every official brand asset is a free download for your devices and social profiles. On the shelves at opening: the desktop wallpaper (4K, the head-on Hornet coming at you over the horizon) and the iPhone wallpaper (1206×2622, native for iPhone 17 with a clean top fifth for the lock-screen clock), the universal profile badge in 400 and 800, and the X cover and YouTube banner for your own pages. Every piece follows the style guide — flat dusk sky over ocean navy, and the Hornet always captured from the game itself.
The headline item is brand new: the CARRIER OPS CERTIFIED — HORNET BAY insignia. A proper squadron patch — amber ring, dusk-cap-and-ocean roundel, the top-down Hornet with its fins in the cap, arc text up top and the wordmark split below. It comes as a transparent 1200×1200 master, a 400×400 avatar cut, and a navy-square version for platforms that insist on one. It’s for celebrating a milestone: trap your first landing on the Big E, then post the patch. Earned, not given — but the download is free.
With a YouTube channel (@HornetBay) joining X (@hornetbay), the brand got unified behind the X artwork — the pilot verdict on that look was "perfect, don't deviate." So it's now the written law: a proper style guide codifies the palette (flat dusk sky #444477 over ocean navy #003366, hornet amber #ffb737), the typography (bold italic serif wordmark — HORNET in white, BAY in amber, with the amber rule under HORNET — plus tracked sans caps), and the imagery rule that matters most: the Hornet is always the game's own 3D model, captured from the retro renderer with its chunky pixels intact, never illustrated or AI-generated. The YouTube collateral was rebuilt to match exactly: profile badge (the in-game Hornet top-down on navy, amber ring), the 2560×1440 banner with every word inside YouTube's safe area, the 1280×720 thumbnail, and the Shorts cut re-rendered with brand-true title bands. The retired patch art is fully replaced — including here on the site: the PWA home-screen icons and a new favicon now carry the badge (service worker cache bumped to v2 so the refresh reaches installed copies). Any future channel or touchpoint gets built from the same page — literally: hornetbay.com is the reference implementation.
