Six palettes, one screen
Two things were wrong with the last round. #FBF1DF was still
cream — caught, and it was a plugin's amber tint rather than ours, which is worse
because it is indistinguishable at a glance. And the reason everything looked
creamy: the artifact page itself was on #FDFAF8.
Neutral white panels read warm against a warm ground, so none of those four options was
actually assessable. This page is on #F4F4F5 for that reason.
One screen — the consent step, the most copy-heavy and brand-sensitive in the flow — drawn six times. Same markup, same structure, same words. Only the token block changes, so colour is the only variable. Candidate A is your suggestion: the literal midpoint of our indigo and core's blue.
Judged against core's own grey
Each carries the letterhead band from the previous round, since that is the recommended device and holding it constant is what makes the palettes comparable.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
A blue-violet that is adjacent to core rather than fighting it. The band tint sits a hair cooler than the admin grey, which reads as intentional. Genuinely the safest of the six. The honest risk: at 20% opacity in a band, a colour 30° from core's blue may just read as core's blue — you get nativeness by becoming slightly invisible.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
Every accent role played by the ink. The only colour on screen is core's own blue button — which makes the button unmissable, and is arguably the correct hierarchy for a screen whose job is answer these and move on. Reads as a well-made tool rather than a branded one. Whether that is discipline or surrender is the actual question, and I do not think it is obvious.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
The most distinctive of the six, and the only one nobody would mistake for another
plugin. Salmon is our most recognisable colour and it has never carried a surface —
the mark keeps the true #FD9597, text drops to
#C4494C for contrast. The problem is unavoidable:
red-family in wp-admin means error. A rose band above a form may read as a
warning for the first half-second, every time.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
Warm feeling without a warm ground — the bone neutral is cooler than cream
and does not fight #f0f0f1. Olive is in the brand set and has
never carried a surface. Same learned-meaning problem as salmon but milder: green in
wp-admin says success or update available, so the band may read as
a status strip rather than a letterhead.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
Keeps our actual brand colour and gets rid of cream by making every neutral a desaturated indigo — the lines, the strip, even the ink. The screen becomes one hue family, which is cohesive in a way none of the others are. Two costs: indigo is the colour already spent on the DDD viewer, and violet-tinted greys next to core's pure greys can look faintly off rather than deliberate on a cheap panel.
SearchSync
Two optional things
Two questions, and no is a complete answer to both.
Send us diagnostics?
The whole payload, as it stands on this site:
| site | oakhill-learning.com |
| php | 8.2.14 |
| wordpress | 6.8.1 |
The band goes to WP's own #1D2327 — the admin bar
and menu colour — so it borrows the one dark surface the environment already has
instead of introducing a new colour. Ties the panel to the chrome vertically, and
the accent mark is the only colour anywhere. Cost: a dark band inside a light panel
is heavy, and it competes with the menu for the eye's first stop.
What the comparison actually shows
Ranked, with the reasoning rather than the taste:
1 · F, ink band. Best answer to "Tangible-ish but at home", because it solves the problem by borrowing: the dark band already exists in the environment, so it cannot look foreign, and one small accent mark is enough to be ours. It also happens to be the strongest per-plugin theming host of all six — the plugin's colour is the mark, on a constant dark ground, so no plugin colour can wreck the band.
2 · A, bridge. Your idea, and the safest. I rank it second only because its safety is bought by being nearly indistinguishable from core at band opacity — which is a real cost if the goal includes identifiable.
3 · B, graphite. Underrated. It gives the blue button the only colour on screen, which is the correct hierarchy for a step whose job is answer-and-move-on. The best fallback if any band at all proves to be one gesture too many.
4 · E, one hue — cohesive, but indigo is spent on DDDash and violet-greys read as slightly-wrong rather than deliberate on a bad panel. 5 · D and 6 · C — killed by learned meaning, not by looks.
A combination worth drawing next, if you want one: F's ink band as the
constant frame, with A's #4265C4 as the Tangible accent on core
steps and the plugin's own colour as the mark on its steps. That keeps the band's
"whose step is this" idea from the previous round while removing the risk that a
plugin's brand colour has to work as a full-width tint.
Still open, and it is the question underneath all six: does Tangible-in-wp-admin get to be warm at all? D is the only candidate that even tries, and it tries by swapping the ground for a cool bone and buying warmth back through the accent. If the answer is no, then the brand's presence here is entirely typographic — the mono label, the ink rule, the copy voice — and the palette question is smaller than it looks.