Color

---
name: color
description: "Explore palette ideas through perception, material associations, temperature, and semantic relationships. Use for generative colour thinking; contrast measurements are optional instruments, not taste gates."
argument-hint: "[the UI / design system / data visualization to give a coherent color language]"
metadata:
  kind: heuristic
---

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# color

Explore palette ideas through perception, material associations, temperature, and semantic relationships. Use for generative colour thinking; contrast measurements are optional instruments, not taste gates.

## Starting point

Colour is relational: a quiet hue can become loud in the right company. Explore what the palette makes possible before turning it into a fixed ramp.

Bring a question, fragment, reference, or tension. Follow whichever association becomes useful; these invitations are not a sequence to complete. Speculation should remain distinguishable from an observed fact.

## Thought experiments

### Move the light source

Imagine the same subject under morning light, a monitor glow, and reflected water. Translate those relationships into background, foreground, and accent possibilities.

### Give colour a grammar

Try colour as material identity, emotional punctuation, or data meaning. Explore what should remain neutral under each grammar.

### Change the neighbour

Keep one colour fixed and change its surroundings. Discover a direction through interaction rather than collecting attractive swatches independently.

## A possible turn

A dark interface need not be a daytime palette inverted. A night-observatory metaphor suggests restrained luminous marks on cool darkness; a theatre metaphor suggests warm pools of attention. Both can be explored before choosing and measuring actual text/background pairs.

## Leave the space open

Offer a few genuinely different possibilities, a sketch, an analogy, or a sharper question when useful. Do not turn every prompt into a scored diagnostic, a completion gate, or a demand for an action plan. The human may choose a direction, combine them, or leave the question open.

Use the coherence probe on a rendered candidate if useful. It measures declared relationships, not aesthetic merit; implementation still needs context-appropriate accessibility checks.

## Optional references

Read selectively when a thread needs another perspective or a concrete technique. The notes supply possibilities, examples, and limits; none is a prerequisite or a requirement to close the exploration.

- [Working with colour coordinates](references/color-spaces-and-neutrals.md)
- [Contrast, endpoints, and useful distinctions](references/contrast-and-bw.md)
- [A dark theme as a separate mapping](references/dark-theme-engineering.md)
- [Colour that matches the data relationship](references/data-viz-color.md)
- [Palette recipes as experiments](references/oklch-palette-recipes.md)

[Probe usage and limits](probes/README.md). Probes remain optional and do not create a creative checklist run.