JournalCraft
Ink, paper, and the discipline of two colours
Every tone in our system is a literal blend of the only two colours we own. Here is why a palette built that way cannot drift.
BOAN has two colours. Ink, a warm near black, and paper, a warm off white. Every other tone in the system, and there are nine of them, is a straight sRGB blend of those two at a fixed percentage.
This is not a stylistic preference. It is a structural decision about how palettes fail.
How a palette drifts
A normal brand palette is a set of chosen colours. Six months in, someone needs a lighter grey for a disabled state and picks one. A year in, someone needs a border colour and picks a different one. Neither person did anything unreasonable, and neither colour is in the guidelines, and now there are fourteen greys in the codebase that nobody chose.
If every tone is defined as a percentage of two fixed colours, that cannot happen. A new tone is not a choice, it is an arithmetic result. It is impossible to introduce a grey that is slightly the wrong temperature, because there is no freedom in which to be wrong.
Contrast, measured rather than assumed
Each tone carries its measured contrast ratio against paper, and the system states which of them may carry body text. Anything below the twenty percent blend fails WCAG AA at body sizes and is documented as unusable for text. That is a rule a developer can follow without judgement, which is the only kind of rule that survives.
The whole thing is published on our brand page, ratios included. It is the shortest colour section in any set of guidelines we have written, and it is the one that has never needed amending.
If any of that is the argument you are currently having internally, we are probably the right people to have it with.
