One grey scale, one accent, one status colour, and a gold that is documented rather than spent. Every swatch below is painted by its token and reads its own hex back out of the rendered page.
Click any row to copy its hex.
01 · The scale
Zinc: the only grey in the brand
Every neutral surface, hairline and ink in the product comes off this one ladder. Grey is where the product spends almost all of its colour budget, so the ladder is kept whole even where the live product has not yet used a step: a scale with holes in it stops being a scale.
The absolute ends
02 · The accent
Blue: state and action
The accent has one job and the job is a sentence: blue says what is happening or what has been chosen. The primary CTA, the active navigation item, a checked radio, a live switch, a ticked checkbox, the selected day of a calendar, the count on a cart. Everything that is simply always there stays black, because that is furniture, and furniture does not wear the accent.
Primary action
Active itemGift recipients
Count3
Focus
Live samples, painted by the same tokens the product is painted by. Hover the button to see 600 → 700; click the field to take the focus.
One recorded deviation, not adopted: the active filter tab of the live catalog is sky-600 #0284c7, a second blue off a foreign scale. It is written down as a live fact and it is not our accent.
03 · Status
Error is the one status colour we own
Red entered the system the only honest way: it was found on the live product. Submitting the guest sign-in empty paints the field border and the message beneath it, and both values were read straight off that screen. They sit on the Tailwind Red scale — a foreign ladder, kept as measured rather than snapped to something of ours.
Warning and success: no value, and that is the state of itThe system owns no amber and no green. Six live pages were measured across seven widths each and the status family never appeared; nothing on the public product is amber or green, and the portal that would show them sits behind a login we have not harvested. So no token exists, and none is invented here. The day a real success or warning surface is measured, it gets a token and this gap closes.
In the meantime, "not finished" and "in progress" are said in Zinc: a zinc-100 plaque in the eyebrow voice, as used on the hub cards and on the rail beside this text. It says the same thing without adding a colour the product cannot back up.
04 · Legacy
Gold: documented, not spent
Gold is in the brand's history and it is on the live product today. It is not in the interface language of this system: the veto is from the owner, 2026-07-30, and it has held through every review since. These values are recorded so that a legacy screen can be read and reproduced faithfully, never so that a new one can be painted with them.
There is a third: the brand book records #c2a545 as the gold, and no measurement has ever matched it. Three golds, none of them the same, none of them a token any new work may reach for. Our own required asterisk has no colour of its own at all: it speaks with the ink of the label beside it (owner's word, 2026-09-10).
