Aesthetic 3000

A3K (Aesthetic 3000) is a retro-futurist “year 3000” synthwave look — neon magenta→cyan gradients, double-line box-drawing wordmarks, and brief power-on animations. Retro-future computing optimism — a named system in its own right, not a one-off theme.

A3K is the design language; Y3K Lab is the umbrella incubator that houses the surfaces that wear it — a terminal-UI engine, a Claude Code theme, a project OS, an RC team, a home. Each wears it in its own format. The through-line is the language, not a monorepo.

The verbs are deliberate: a surface wears A3K; an engine like Phos4 is fluent in it and renders it; built is reserved for the tagline, Built for the year 3000.

The one canonical shared asset. Everything else — wordmarks, chips, headers, doorways — is the palette bound to a surface’s own tokens. Get the ramp and the temperature map right and a surface reads as Y3K; the rest is binding. All values are ANSI 256-colour indices.

39 is the accent; 45 is a ramp stop. Both are cyan and they are not interchangeable. The accent marks the one live thing on a screen — a glyph, a spinner, a rule. Cyan 45 is the ramp’s cool end and the right-hand box-rail that frames a wordmark, paired with magenta 201 on the left. Reach for 39 when something is alive; reach for 45 when something is structure.

The identity hangs on one idea: lifecycle state = colour temperature. It isn’t decoration — it enforces the hierarchy for free. Active pops forward, dormant recedes, with no extra weight or size cue.

Wordmarks are set in a double-line box-drawing font, framed and gradient-filled. There is no double-line diagonal in Unicode, so the letters that need one were hand-built from the available pieces — part of the brand’s story, documented so they’re reused, not reinvented.

╦  ╦
╚╗╔╝
 ╚╝ 

╦╗╦
║╚╣
╩ ╩

╦ ╦
║║║
╚╩╝

╦ ╦
╚╦╝
 ╩ 

╔╦╗
 ║
╚╩╝

A boxed wordmark has a louder sibling — the celebration banner (giant full-block letters) for the moment a surface finishes something: an installer’s success, a completed build. The banner shouts the name; a letter-spaced bracketed caption whispers the meaning.

A gradient sweeps the ramp across a string. Section headers take a temperature-appropriate slice — so a header sweeps yet stays in its own band. (Every section title on this page is a warm slice; the rule, applied to itself.)

A chip is a short padded label with a background fill. Three independent dials — weight, muting, hue — each carry one meaning.

Bright fill = primary action · muted fill = secondary doorway · colour = section or destination.

Animated moments are opt-in or one-shot, and short — a banner powers on (rows reveal top→bottom), shimmers (the 16-stop ramp marches down), then settles into the static gradient. Two rules: degrade off-TTY (never animate into a pipe) and stay sub-second. Animations are punctuation, not entertainment.

The words are part of the brand too.

A table is how A3K states canon — the palette, the statuses, the element registry are all tables. The registry style reads as an instrument readout, not a spreadsheet: rails, not zebra · headers whisper (the caption idiom) · one ramp rule crowns the top · the key column carries the ink · colour only where it means something.

Single-line rails — double-line stays reserved for wordmarks · accent only on the cue-bearing tile numbers · hover = the menu highlight.

The brand travels by binding the canonical palette to a surface’s own token vocabulary — ANSI escapes for a terminal, theme-token JSON for an editor, CSS for the web. Pick the temperature of each thing (§3); that answer picks its hue. Use the ramp, not raw colours. Apply the chip-weight rule. If you animate, keep it sub-second. Match the voice.

The surfaces that wear A3K — and where to find them: