Verity Legal stopped arguing about grey

The manual specified fourteen greys. The site used nine of them, none identical to the specified values, and two of them failed contrast against their own backgrounds. Nobody had done anything wrong; the greys were picked at different times by different people, all of whom were being reasonable.

Deriving instead of choosing

We removed grey from the vocabulary entirely. Every neutral in the new system is the practice’s green at very low chroma, which is why the site reads as considered rather than as a template with a colour dropped in. A pure neutral grey is the one colour that tells the reader nobody chose it.

Institutional without being dated

The preset uses a tighter type scale and square corners. Both decisions come from the same brief: this is a firm where clients arrive worried, and a page that feels casual is a page that costs the practice work.

The manual is now nine pages, because eight of the old sections described values a machine can derive.