Centering brand logo in Bootstrap Navbar

I am trying to implement a Bootstrap 3 navbar so that the brand logo to always remain in the middle. This is the code:

<div class="navbar navbar-fixed-top navbar-default">
  <div class="navbar-inner">
    <div class="container">
      <button type="button" style="float: left;" class="pull-left btn btn-navbar navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".nav-collapse">
      <span class="icon-bar"></span>
      <span class="icon-bar"></span>
      <span class="icon-bar"></span>
      </button>
      <a class="brand" style="margin: 0; float: none;" href="#">
      <img src="/Content/themes/next/images/logo.png" /></a>
      <div class="nav-collapse">
        <ul class="nav">
          <li> <a href="#">Item 1</a></li>
          <li> <a href="#">Item 1</a></li>
          <li> <a href="#">Item 1</a></li>
        </ul>
      </div>
      <ul class="nav pull-right">
        <li>
          <a href="#">
            <div class="nextCog"></div>
          </a>
        </li>
      </ul>
      <span class="navbar-text pull-right">superpup1 </span>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

It makes a nice looking navbar:

However, I would like the logo (green) remain in the middle persistently. I am adding this style to the tag with "brand" class:

<a class="brand" style="margin: 0; float: none; text-align:center" href="#">
  <img src="/Content/themes/next/images/logo.png" />
</a>

It partially solves the problem: the logo is in the middle but it pushes the rest of the navbar elements down:

This is an undesirable effect that I would like to eliminate. Could you suggest a solution? Maybe it's a wrong approach to centering a logo from the start ?

Try this:

.navbar {
    position: relative;
}
.brand {
    position: absolute;
    left: 50%;
    margin-left: -50px !important;  /* 50% of your logo width */
    display: block;
}

Centering your logo by 50% and minus half of your logo width so that it won't have problem when zooming in and out.

See fiddle

The simplest way is css transform:

.navbar-brand {
  transform: translateX(-50%);
  left: 50%;
  position: absolute;
}

DEMO: http://codepen.io/candid/pen/dGPZvR

This way also works with dynamically sized background images for the logo and allows us to utilize the text-hide class:

CSS:

.navbar-brand {
  background: url(http://disputebills.com/site/uploads/2015/10/dispute.png) center / contain no-repeat;
  transform: translateX(-50%);
  left: 50%;
  position: absolute;
  width: 200px; /* no height needed ... image will resize automagically */
}

HTML:

<a class="navbar-brand text-hide" href="http://disputebills.com">Brand Text
        </a>

We can also use flexbox though. However, using this method we'd have to move navbar-brand outside of navbar-header. This way is great though because we can now have image and text side by side:

.brand-centered {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  left: 0;
  top: 0;
}
.navbar-brand {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

Demo: http://codepen.io/candid/pen/yeLZax

To only achieve these results on mobile simply wrap the above css inside a media query:

@media (max-width: 768px) {

}