Who
People building a life they own.
Hardcore kids, skaters, heads, workers, outsiders. People who would rather be difficult than comfortable.
Cold Vein brand system
Become harder to kill.
New York / Philadelphia
Hardcore Internal + external use
Version 1.0 冷穴
Hardcore Internal + external use
Version 1.0 冷穴
01 / Positioning
What we are
A hardcore band
from cold ground.
Cold Vein is a New York / Philadelphia hardcore band born from the ruins of PASSAGE. The work is about self-sovereignty, discipline and anti-fragility — the idea that pressure can make a thing harder to kill.
We make music and objects that feel like pressure you can survive.
What
Hardcore. Heavy, lean, physical.
No filler. No theater. Guitars like weather. Drums like a door closing. A voice with dirt in it.
Why
To make pressure useful.
To turn damage into structure. To practice sovereignty in a world that wants you dependent. To become harder to kill.
Brand essence
Old growth.
Cold water.
No shelter.
Primary line
Become harder to kill.
Secondary line
The cold remembers.
Campaign line
No shelter. No softness.
02 / The mark
One signature. One stamp.
The mark is
a scar, not a logo.
The handstyle is the band’s signature: immediate, human and a little feral. The distressed lockup is the stamp for merch, labels and small formats. Use the right mark for the scale.
Primary / signature01
Handstyle wordmark / bone on understory
Secondary / stamp02
Distressed lockup / ink on bone
Seal / glyph03
冷穴
Use as a sign-off. Never as a translation.
System mark04
The split. Favicon, avatar, small digital use.
Clearspace05
Keep one X of clearspace on all sides. X = cap height.
Minimum sizes
- Handstyle / screen120 px wide
- Handstyle / print28 mm wide
- Distressed / screen80 px wide
- Split mark24 px wide
Do not
- Add gradients, bevels, glows or drop shadows.
- Stretch, outline, rotate or re-letter the marks.
- Recolor outside the palette.
- Place the mark on a busy image without a dark scrim.
03 / Color
A forest at night
Dark greens.
Warm bone.
One warning.
The palette is a forest at night, not a color wheel. Cool greens and deep blacks carry the world. Bone gives it air. Ember is the one signal color — a cut, a warning, a live wire.
Understory01
#050806
Base / 60%
Peat02
#0E1712
Surface / 15%
Moss03
#223127
Depth / 10%
Fog04
#89978C
Metadata / 8%
Bone05
#EDE9DD
Light / 5%
Ember06
#C56A4A
Signal / 2%
60 Understory15 Peat10 Moss8 Fog5 Bone2 Ember
Contrast
Bone on Understory is 16.6:1. Fog on Understory is 6.6:1. Ember on Understory is 5.3:1. Never set body copy in Ember or place Bone on Fog.
Use
Ember is for a single point of attention: an active state, a line, a date, a warning. If two things on a screen are Ember, one of them is wrong.
04 / Typography
Two voices, one system
Loud when
it matters.
Legible after.
Archivo carries the weight. IBM Plex Mono handles the metadata. One display weight, one body weight, one label size. No all-caps paragraphs. No outline type. Restraint makes the loud parts louder.
Archivo / 900 / Display
Become
harder
to kill.
Archivo / Display
Formation
Archivo / Body
A handful of disciplined people can choose to either do a lot of damage, or undo a lot of damage.
IBM Plex Mono / Label
NEW YORK / PHILADELPHIA
THE COLD BEAST TOUR 2026
10 TRACKS / 24:59
Display XLCOLD96–240 px
Display LFORMATION64–120 px
HeadingThe Cold Beast Tour32–64 px
BodyPlay it loud enough to feel the pressure.15–18 px
LabelNEW YORK / PHILADELPHIA8–11 px
05 / Image
The visual weather
Cold water.
Wet stone.
Human evidence.
Photography should feel found, not staged. Overcast light, fog, wet rock, old trees, a room with the lights low. The band is in the frame, but the landscape has the final word.
Treatment
Desaturate 40–60%. Push a cool green cast into the shadows. Keep the blacks deep, not crushed to mud. Add grain at 4–8%. Let skin and concrete keep their texture.
Do not
No sunsets, neon, fire, smoke machines, staged laughter or stock-photo “band” setups. No heavy vignettes. No filters that make the image look clean. If it feels comfortable, it is the wrong image.
06 / Grid + system
Structure under the noise
Hard edges.
Clear rules.
A 12-column grid, 24 px gutters, a 1680 px maximum, 1 px rules and zero border radius. The system should feel printed, not decorated.
STREAM / 01FORMATION↗
TOUR / 022026↗
STORE / 03U.S.↗
Buttons
Data row
01Formation03:17↗
Motion
600–900 ms. Weighted ease-out. No bounce. Parallax under 8%. Reduce motion when asked.
Do
Align to the grid. Use one focal point per composition. Let empty space do work. Keep the rules visible.
Do not
No rounded cards. No glassmorphism. No floating shadows. No multiple accent colors. No centered body copy longer than one sentence.
07 / Voice
Say less. Mean it.
No hype.
No apology.
Cold Vein speaks like a person who has already made the decision. Short sentences. Hard stops. Physical images. Conviction without salesmanship.
01
Short sentences. Hard stops.
Cut every word that is only there to sound excited. If the sentence needs a breath, start a new one.
02
Use the physical world.
Water, stone, roots, weather, weight, doors. Concrete images beat adjectives every time.
03
Conviction, not hype.
Do not tell people it is insane. Tell them what it is. Let them decide.
04
Never explain the mystique.
Not everything needs a caption. Some things should just stand there and be true.
Use
vein · formation · pressure · cold · root · stone · discipline · sovereign · anti-fragile · beneath · waterline · old growth · endure
Avoid
brutal · face-melting · content · drop · fam · insane · killer · game-changer · “new era”
Release
Formation. Ten tracks. Out now. Play it loud enough to feel the pressure.
Tour
Three nights. No shelter. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Richmond. November.
Merch
Heavy cotton. Hard graphics. Built to be worn hard.
08 / Applications
The system in the wild
Flyers.
Feed.
Merch.
Every application keeps the same hierarchy: a mark or a line, one dominant block of type, one piece of information, one point of Ember.
Cold Vein / Live冷穴
The Cold Beast Tour 2026
Philly
Nov 06
Mom’s Living RoomCold Vein / Hardcore
Become harder to kill.
@cold.vein
Cold Vein
冷穴
NY / PHL2026
Show flyer / portraitSocial / 1:1Merch tag / 2:1
09 / Assets
The working files
Use the
real thing.
Original marks, covers and images. Do not trace, redraw or “clean up” the handstyle. If a use is not covered here, ask before you make a new rule.
Primary handstyle / bone PNGDownload ↗
Primary handstyle / white PNGDownload ↗
Distressed lockup / bone PNGDownload ↗
Distressed lockup / ink PNGDownload ↗
Split mark / SVGDownload ↗
Environment image / JPGDownload ↗
Formation cover / JPGDownload ↗
Break Away cover / JPGDownload ↗
Brand system / PDFDownload ↗
Stewardship
Cold Vein controls the marks, photography and applications. Use this system for official band communication, releases and merchandise. Do not use it to imply endorsement.