Brand
Cold Crabby is a crab hugging an ice cube. That's most of what you need to know.
The name
Cold Crabby. Two words, both capitalised. Never "ColdCrabby", never "coldcrabby", never abbreviated to "CC".
The desktop application is Cold Crabby Desktop. The underlying Rust project is slicer-engine, which is what you'll see in repository names, binaries and config paths — use it when you mean the engine, not the product.
The mascot
A crab hugging an ice cube. Warm creature, cold object — which is the joke, and also the point: a slicer is a friendly tool doing something precise.
The mascot leads. Where a logo appears at any reasonable size, it's the crab, not a wordmark. The wordmark sits beside it in the app chrome and works alone only where the mascot would be illegible.
Assets
All in ui/public/.
| File | Use |
|---|---|
logo_hero.png | README headers, marketing, anywhere large |
logo.png, [email protected], [email protected] | The animated mark |
logo_still.png, [email protected], [email protected] | The static mark, used in the app's own chrome |
logo_source.png | The 1024² master everything else is cut from |
splash-logo.webp | The boot splash's mark — generated, see below |
apple-touch-icon.png, favicon* | Web and home-screen icons |
Application icons are generated, never hand-edited. One master — ui-desktop/src-tauri/app-icon.png, cropped from logo_source.png — feeds every platform via pnpm run icons. If an icon looks wrong, fix the master and regenerate.
The boot splash's logo is generated too, from [email protected] via pnpm run splash-logo (needs brew install webp). It emits two things: the splash-logo.webp asset, and a tiny base64 stand-in embedded directly in ui/src/index.html that shows before any request completes. Never hand-edit that blob — change the artwork and regenerate.
Colour
The default accent is molten amber. It lightens a little in dark mode so it stays legible on graphite — the chip below is whichever you're reading in right now, read straight off this page's own theme.
- Molten AmberDefault accent
Five alternates ship alongside it, and users can pick any colour they like:
- Teal
- Indigo
- Violet
- Rose
- Forest
On macOS and Windows the app can inherit the system accent instead. That's not a compromise — it's the intent. See below.
Everything else is neutral: warm graphite, near-white in light mode and deep in dark. These are the surfaces the app is built from, and the ones this page is drawn on.
- Canvas
- Surface
- Border
- Text
- Muted text
Three more carry meaning, and only meaning — a green that says something worked, an amber that says check this, a red that says this will destroy something:
- Success
- Warning
- Danger
Models render in neutral grey unless you turn on filament colouring.
The design language
Native, not branded. The interface should look like it belongs to the operating system it's running on, not like a website that happens to be in a window. Brand colour lives in the accent and the mascot, and nowhere else. No component hardcodes a brand colour.
Modern and subtle. Whitespace, surface tone and typography do the work. Gradients, heavy shadows and decorative boxes don't. When in doubt, the quieter option is correct.
Beginners and power users at once. Big obvious actions and sensible defaults for someone's first print; keyboard shortcuts, dense settings and full control for someone's thousandth. Not two modes — one interface that reveals depth as you look for it.
Restraint has rules. There is exactly one blur effect in the whole app, used only where a surface floats over the 3D scene. Borders are an emphasis tool, not a default — regions separate by surface tone, not by lines. Focus reads as a shape change, not a colour flood.
Full detail is in the design language guide, which is what contributors work to.
Voice
Plain, direct, and honest about limits.
- Say what something does, not how sophisticated it is.
- Name the trade-off. "Smaller means smoother and slower" beats "optimised quality".
- Warn rather than refuse, where a check is an estimate rather than a fact.
- Errors carry the actual reason. A bad API key and an unreachable host should never read the same.
- No exclamation marks, no "simply", no "just".
Using the brand
The name, mascot and logo belong to the project. Using them for your own product or implying an endorsement isn't permitted.
Writing about Cold Crabby, linking to it, screenshotting it, or using the logo to refer to the project itself is fine and welcome.
The project's code is all rights reserved pending a licence decision. See Data, privacy and licensing.