Notes
June 30, 2026 · 1 min read
We stopped picking greys
A pure neutral is the one colour on a page that tells the reader nobody chose it.
Text
Open almost any design file and you will find a grey scale that was picked once, early, by someone who had not yet seen the brand colour it would sit next to. It survives because nothing ever obviously breaks.
The alternative costs nothing. Take the brand hue, drop the chroma to somewhere between 0.006 and 0.036 depending on how far down the ladder you are, and every neutral in the system is now quietly related to the identity. Nobody consciously notices. Everybody reads the page as more considered than it was yesterday.
Why it has to be perceptual
Do this in HSL and the greys will drift in apparent lightness as the hue moves — a yellow-tinted neutral will read lighter than a blue-tinted one at the same nominal value. In OKLCH the lightness number means what it says, so the ramp holds whichever hue you feed it. That is the entire reason the colour space matters here; it is not a fashion.
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