Ink
Every shell surface
Design system · Rust desktop environment
Saola: three colors, one rule
Saola is a Linux desktop environment written in Rust — and the design system that keeps it a single coherent thing. The same tokens style the status bar, the widget gallery, and the website you're looking at right now.
The look
Built from three colors — and only three
An ivory fill is a control at rest; a terracotta fill is something switched on. Everything else follows from that.
Paper
A control at rest
Terracotta
On, selected, focused, live
The pieces
One identity, three exports
The design system
saola-theme
The one place the Saola look is defined. Design tokens as pure data (serde + TOML) plus style helpers for iced 0.14 — so the whole desktop stays a single coherent thing instead of a collection of apps that happen to ship together.
The status barsaola-panel
A full-width ink shell surface via wlr-layer-shell, targeting niri. Clock, battery, and Wi-Fi modules — every color and size comes from the theme; the code hardcodes none.
The web exportastro-kit
The same identity, exported for the web: a Tailwind v4 CSS-first token layer with a Preline skin, IBM Plex subsets, and the brand marks. It styles the site you are reading right now.
Principles
The rules that keep it Saola
Surfaces, not modes
There is no dark mode and no light mode. Every element knows which surface it sits on — ink or paper — and derives its text, dividers, and hover states from the identity colors by alpha.
One rule for state
An ivory fill is a control at rest; a terracotta fill is something switched on. A charging battery shows terracotta, a discharging one shows ivory. That single rule carries the whole interface.
Pills and over-rounded rectangles
Every shape is a pill or an over-rounded rectangle, and keyboard focus is always a terracotta ring. Shadows appear only on true overlays.
IBM Plex, two weights
Sans, Serif, and Mono — at regular and medium only. Serif appears sparingly, mono carries labels and data, and the type scale is shared between the desktop and the web.
Curious about the details?
The canonical token definitions, the live widget gallery, and the iced style helpers are all open source — dual-licensed Apache-2.0 / MIT.