Additional context needed: existing brand colors.

Replace timid grayscale or single-accent designs with a strategic palette: pick a color strategy, choose a hue family that fits the brand, then apply color with intent. More color ≠ better. Strategic color beats rainbow vomit.

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Register

Brand: palette IS voice. Pick a color strategy first per SKILL.md (Restrained / Committed / Full palette / Drenched) and follow its dosage. Committed, Full palette, and Drenched deliberately exceed the ≤10% rule; that rule is Restrained only. Unexpected combinations are allowed; a dominant color can own the page when the chosen strategy calls for it.

Product: semantic-first and almost always Restrained. Accent color is reserved for primary action, current selection, and state indicators. Not decoration. Every color has a consistent meaning across every screen.

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Assess Color Opportunity

Analyze the current state and identify opportunities:

1. Understand current state:
   • Color absence: Pure grayscale? Limited neutrals? One timid accent?
   • Missed opportunities: Where could color add meaning, hierarchy, or delight?
   • Context: What’s appropriate for this domain and audience?
   • Brand: Are there existing brand colors we should use?
2. Identify where color adds value:
   • Semantic meaning: Success (green), error (red), warning (yellow/orange), info (blue)
   • Hierarchy: Drawing attention to important elements
   • Categorization: Different sections, types, or states
   • Emotional tone: Warmth, energy, trust, creativity
   • Wayfinding: Helping users navigate and understand structure
   • Delight: Moments of visual interest and personality

If any of these are unclear from the codebase, STOP and use Codex’s structured user-input/question tool when available; if unavailable, ask directly in chat to clarify what you cannot infer.

CRITICAL: More color ≠ better. Strategic color beats rainbow vomit every time. Every color should have a purpose.

Plan Color Strategy

Create a purposeful color introduction plan:

• Color palette: What colors match the brand/context? (Choose 2-4 colors max beyond neutrals)
• Dominant color: Which color owns 60% of colored elements?
• Accent colors: Which colors provide contrast and highlights? (30% and 10%)
• Application strategy: Where does each color appear and why?

IMPORTANT: Color should enhance hierarchy and meaning, not create chaos. Less is more when it matters more.

Introduce Color Strategically

Add color systematically across these dimensions:

Semantic Color

• State indicators:
  • Success: Green tones (emerald, forest, mint)
  • Error: Red/pink tones (rose, crimson, coral)
  • Warning: Orange/amber tones
  • Info: Blue tones (sky, ocean, indigo)
  • Neutral: Gray/slate for inactive states
• Status badges: Colored backgrounds or borders for states (active, pending, completed, etc.)
• Progress indicators: Colored bars, rings, or charts showing completion or health

Accent Color Application

• Primary actions: Color the most important buttons/CTAs
• Links: Add color to clickable text (maintain accessibility)
• Icons: Colorize key icons for recognition and personality
• Headers/titles: Add color to section headers or key labels
• Hover states: Introduce color on interaction

Background & Surfaces

• Tinted backgrounds: If you replace pure gray, tint toward the brand hue, not toward a generic-warm-or-cool pair. The default-warm-tint (oklch(97% 0.01 60) and its neighbors) is now the AI cream/sand giveaway. Be specific to the brand or stay neutral.
• Colored sections: Use subtle background colors to separate areas
• Gradient backgrounds: Add depth with subtle, intentional gradients (not generic purple-blue)
• Cards & surfaces: Tint cards or surfaces toward the brand, not “for warmth” by reflex

Use OKLCH for color: It’s perceptually uniform, meaning equal steps in lightness look equal. Great for generating harmonious scales.

Data Visualization

• Charts & graphs: Use color to encode categories or values
• Heatmaps: Color intensity shows density or importance
• Comparison: Color coding for different datasets or timeframes

Borders & Accents

• Hairline borders: 1px colored borders on full perimeter (not side-stripes; see the absolute ban on border-left/right > 1px)
• Underlines: Color underlines for emphasis or active states
• Dividers: Subtle colored dividers instead of gray lines
• Focus rings: Colored focus indicators matching brand
• Surface tints: A 4-8% background wash of the accent color instead of a stripe

NEVER: border-left or border-right greater than 1px as a colored accent stripe. This is one of the three absolute bans in the parent skill. If you want to mark a card as “active” or “warning”, use a full hairline border, a background tint, a leading glyph, or a numbered prefix. Not a side stripe.

Typography Color

• Colored headings: Use brand colors for section headings (maintain contrast)
• Highlight text: Color for emphasis or categories
• Labels & tags: Small colored labels for metadata or categories

Decorative Elements

• Illustrations: Add colored illustrations or icons
• Shapes: Geometric shapes in brand colors as background elements
• Gradients: Colorful gradient overlays or mesh backgrounds
• Blobs/organic shapes: Soft colored shapes for visual interest

Balance & Refinement

Ensure color addition improves rather than overwhelms:

Maintain Hierarchy

• Dominant color (60%): Primary brand color or most used accent
• Secondary color (30%): Supporting color for variety
• Accent color (10%): High contrast for key moments
• Neutrals (remaining): Gray/black/white for structure

Accessibility

• Contrast ratios: Ensure WCAG compliance (4.5:1 for text, 3:1 for UI components)
• Don’t rely on color alone: Use icons, labels, or patterns alongside color
• Test for color blindness: Verify red/green combinations work for all users

Cohesion

• Consistent palette: Use colors from defined palette, not arbitrary choices
• Systematic application: Same color meanings throughout (green always = success)
• Temperature consistency: Warm palette stays warm, cool stays cool

NEVER:

• Use every color in the rainbow (choose 2-4 colors beyond neutrals)
• Apply color randomly without semantic meaning
• Put gray text on colored backgrounds. It looks washed out; use a darker shade of the background color or transparency instead
• Violate WCAG contrast requirements
• Use color as the only indicator (accessibility issue)
• Make everything colorful (defeats the purpose)
• Default to purple-blue gradients (AI slop aesthetic)

Verify Color Addition

Test that colorization improves the experience:

• Better hierarchy: Does color guide attention appropriately?
• Clearer meaning: Does color help users understand states/categories?
• More engaging: Does the interface feel warmer and more inviting?
• Still accessible: Do all color combinations meet WCAG standards?
• Not overwhelming: Is color balanced and purposeful?

When the palette earns its place, hand off to $impeccable polish for the final pass.

Live-mode signature params

When invoked from live mode, each variant MUST declare a color-amount param so the user can dial between a restrained accent and a drenched surface without regeneration. Author the variant’s CSS against var(--p-color-amount, 0.5), typically as the alpha multiplier on backgrounds, or as a scaling factor on the chroma axis in an OKLCH expression. 0 = neutral/monochrome, 1 = full saturation / dominant coverage.

{"id":"color-amount","kind":"range","min":0,"max":1,"step":0.05,"default":0.5,"label":"Color amount"}

Layer 1-2 variant-specific params on top: palette selection (steps with named options), temperature warmth, or tint vs. true color. See reference/live.md for the full params contract.

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Reference Material

The sections below were previously color-and-contrast.md and live inline now so the colorize flow has its deep color reference in one place.

Color & Contrast

Color Spaces: Use OKLCH

Stop using HSL. Use OKLCH (or LCH) instead. It’s perceptually uniform, meaning equal steps in lightness look equal, unlike HSL where 50% lightness in yellow looks bright while 50% in blue looks dark.

The OKLCH function takes three components: oklch(lightness chroma hue) where lightness is 0-100%, chroma is roughly 0-0.4, and hue is 0-360. To build a primary color and its lighter / darker variants, hold the chroma+hue roughly constant and vary the lightness, but reduce chroma as you approach white or black, because high chroma at extreme lightness looks garish.

The hue you pick is a brand decision and should not come from a default. Do not reach for blue (hue 250) or warm orange (hue 60) by reflex; those are the dominant AI-design defaults, not the right answer for any specific brand.

Building Functional Palettes

Tinted Neutrals

Pure gray is dead. A neutral with zero chroma feels lifeless next to a colored brand. Add a tiny chroma value (0.005-0.015) to all your neutrals, hued toward whatever your brand color is. The chroma is small enough not to read as “tinted” consciously, but it creates subconscious cohesion between brand color and UI surfaces.

The hue you tint toward should come from THIS project’s brand, not from a “warm = friendly, cool = tech” formula. If your brand color is teal, your neutrals lean toward teal. If your brand color is amber, they lean toward amber. The point is cohesion with the SPECIFIC brand, not a stock palette.

Avoid the trap of always tinting toward warm orange or always tinting toward cool blue. Those are the two laziest defaults and they create their own monoculture across projects.

Palette Structure

A complete system needs:

Role	Purpose	Example
Primary	Brand, CTAs, key actions	1 color, 3-5 shades
Neutral	Text, backgrounds, borders	9-11 shade scale
Semantic	Success, error, warning, info	4 colors, 2-3 shades each
Surface	Cards, modals, overlays	2-3 elevation levels

Skip secondary/tertiary unless you need them. Most apps work fine with one accent color. Adding more creates decision fatigue and visual noise.

The 60-30-10 Rule (Applied Correctly)

This rule is about visual weight, not pixel count:

• 60%: Neutral backgrounds, white space, base surfaces
• 30%: Secondary colors: text, borders, inactive states
• 10%: Accent: CTAs, highlights, focus states

The common mistake: using the accent color everywhere because it’s “the brand color.” Accent colors work because they’re rare. Overuse kills their power.

Contrast & Accessibility

WCAG Requirements

Content Type	AA Minimum	AAA Target
Body text	4.5:1	7:1
Large text (18px+ or 14px bold)	3:1	4.5:1
UI components, icons	3:1	4.5:1
Non-essential decorations	None	None

Dangerous Color Combinations

These commonly fail contrast or cause readability issues:

• Light gray text on white (the #1 accessibility fail)
• Red text on green background (or vice versa): 8% of men can’t distinguish these
• Blue text on red background (vibrates visually)
• Yellow text on white (almost always fails)
• Thin light text on images (unpredictable contrast)

Testing

Don’t trust your eyes. Use tools:

• WebAIM Contrast Checker
• Browser DevTools → Rendering → Emulate vision deficiencies
• Polypane for real-time testing

Theming: Light & Dark Mode

Dark Mode Is Not Inverted Light Mode

You can’t just swap colors. Dark mode requires different design decisions:

Light Mode	Dark Mode
Shadows for depth	Lighter surfaces for depth (no shadows)
Dark text on light	Light text on dark (reduce font weight)
Vibrant accents	Desaturate accents slightly
White backgrounds	Either pure black or a deep surface that fits the brand (a brand-tinted near-black at oklch 12-18% works too)

In dark mode, depth comes from surface lightness, not shadow. Build a 3-step surface scale where higher elevations are lighter (e.g. 15% / 20% / 25% lightness). Use the SAME hue and chroma as your brand color (whatever it is for THIS project; do not reach for blue) and only vary the lightness. Reduce body text weight slightly (e.g. 350 instead of 400) because light text on dark reads as heavier than dark text on light.

Token Hierarchy

Use two layers: primitive tokens (--blue-500) and semantic tokens (--color-primary: var(--blue-500)). For dark mode, only redefine the semantic layer; primitives stay the same.

Alpha Is A Design Smell

Heavy use of transparency (rgba, hsla) usually means an incomplete palette. Alpha creates unpredictable contrast, performance overhead, and inconsistency. Define explicit overlay colors for each context instead. Exception: focus rings and interactive states where see-through is needed.

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Avoid: Relying on color alone to convey information. Creating palettes without clear roles for each color. Skipping color blindness testing (8% of men affected).