The Zaps
brand system.
Everything you need to talk about Zaps, quote Zaps, or ship a Zaps surface. Specifications are literal. Principles are the reasons the specifications exist. If you’re in a hurry, skip to Downloads — the assets are signed and unpacked.
Zaps is a real-time key-value platform built for agents. It runs RESP3, gRPC, and WebSocket on one port, fans out key-change events in under a millisecond, and audits every mutation as it happens. The brand inherits the discipline of the runtime: small vocabulary, literal surfaces, zero decoration that isn’t doing work.
Two consequences run through the system. First, the canvases are black and cream — never grey, never bluish. Second, Bolt, our pixel-art mascot, is allowed to exist. He peeks in from the edges of pages, reacts to scroll, and gives what would otherwise be a very serious system room to smile.
Bolt’s mouth (smile / O / flat / none) and arm state (both-up, left-up, right-up, wave, both-out, none) are configured per route. See components/peekaboo.tsx for the current map.
12-column grid on an 8px base. Body copy measures 72ch. Display type runs full-bleed. Immersive scroll sections are pinned at h-screen and clear the fixed 56px nav.
one port.
Scrub, don't auto-play
Immersive sections pin and scrub with scroll. The user controls time. rAF drives animation from a ref — React never re-renders on scroll.
Canvas first for telemetry
Oscilloscopes, packet journeys, TUI dashboards use Canvas 2D with hashed-noise jitter. AR(1) walks, not summed sines. Analog ADC flicker beats a pretty curve.
Stagger, never swarm
Siblings enter 80ms apart with cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1). Nothing bounces. Characters can reveal per-glyph; blocks never do.
Zaps writes the way good runbooks read. Short sentences. Specific nouns. Concrete nums. Active verbs. No “unlock”, “leverage”, “AI-powered”, “next-generation”, or “enterprise-grade”. If a sentence could be said about any product, it isn’t ours.
“One write. Every matching subscriber.”
“Event-driven notification infrastructure at scale.”
“Three engines, one port.”
“Unified multi-protocol architecture with pluggable backends.”
“Purpose databases know their workload.”
“AI-optimized database profiles for agentic workloads.”
“Redis, but every operation is audited.”
“Next-generation key-value store with enterprise-grade observability.”
“Install in thirty seconds.”
“Streamline your onboarding with our intuitive setup experience.”
Everything you need to ship a Zaps surface or write about Zaps in print. The wordmark is a single-path SVG that follows currentColor. Bolt ships as a multi-path SVG with his yellow fill baked in — don’t recolour him unless you have a good reason.
