Color articles and design guides

Palettes that have to work in two themes, at 4.5:1, on hardware you don't control. This tag treats color as a systems problem rather than a taste one. Contrast baked into tokens beats contrast checked at review, because the token survives the redesign and the review doesn't. Apple Intelligence brought glow and gradient back into product UI and there's a right and wrong way to borrow that. Dark mode is where most palettes fail first, so it gets attention here. The posts here run from the practical to the mechanical. One compares color palette generators on the things that matter in production, like whether they export OKLCH and whether they check contrast while you work. Another shows how to bake WCAG ratios into a token set, so a rebrand can't quietly break them. The dark mode guides cover the first real stress test a palette gets: surfaces that sit only a few lightness steps apart, body text that needs a different weight on black, and status colors that must read on both backgrounds. Why start with contrast? Because it's the one color decision you can settle with a number instead of an opinion. Read that piece first, and the rest of this tag will lean on it.