I stopped eyeballing my palette

Design school trains you to judge color by eye. That habit does not survive dark mode.

So I rebuilt mine in OKLCH, where lightness steps actually look even. Björn Ottosson designed the space (opens in a new tab) to predict how light and how colorful a color looks to a person.

A dark palette in five steps
The recipe, in the order I do it.

Then I measured instead of trusting myself. Ivory on the canvas: 17.3 to 1. Muted text: 8.4. Cobalt as a link: 7.2. WCAG 2.2 (opens in a new tab) asks for 4.5 for body text.

You do not need to do the arithmetic yourself. Paste this and check what comes back:

Prompt

Convert my color tokens to OKLCH. Keep each hue fixed, step lightness evenly for
surfaces, and give me a contrast table for every text and background pair, marked
against WCAG 2.2 AA.

You make the taste calls. The agent shows its work. My build now checks every pair, so a future change cannot quietly drop one below the line.

Taste picks the palette. Numbers keep it honest.

Want it as slides? Download the carousel.