Promoted out of foundation/en-draft/constitutional/ on 2026-09-06. The page was written 2026-05-31, sorted through documentation/constitutional-core-test.md, and never moved — en-draft/ named the Swedish-to-English migration, not the maturity of the content. It sat outside every publishing folder for three months while constitutional/ had no page for colour at all. status: proposed rather than accepted: the Detection section is marked PROPOSED — governance, needs sign-off, and the Open items below ask for confirmations that have not been given. The move is done; the ratification is not.

Colour is the Aleris palette.

Status: decided · Owner: Head of Design · Scope: all Aleris colour use — digital, print, physical · Version: v1.0-draft · Updated: 2026-05-31

Author: Torfinn Almers · Audience: designers, writers, the assistant/LLM layer, and the viewports that render brand-os Supersedes: principles/colour.md (in part — the non-negotiable core) · Related: [[principles/colour]], [[constant-and-contextual]], [[accessibility-is-foundational]]

Draft — constitutional-core sort output (2026-05-31). Provenance is marked so the content boundary stays visible: (draft-xlat) is relocated from the unverified English translation foundation/en-draft/colour.md and still needs Torfinn's voice pass; PROPOSED is new scaffolding text; everything else is structure. Sorted with documentation/constitutional-core-test.md — only the lines that passed detectable + constant + identity-defining are here; craft and accessibility rules were routed out (see Open). A constitutional file is short by design.

PROPOSED — hook (ratified 2026-09-07, Torfinn). The palette communicates before a single letter is read. This file holds only what makes a colour choice not Aleris. The roles in full, the composition logic, and the accessibility detail live in principles/colour.md.

1. The palette is petrol, sand, and orange — three families, three roles.

The palette is petrol, sand, and orange – three families, three roles. Petrol carries structure and trust. Orange drives emotion, attention and action. Sand is the surrounding calm everything rests against.

Implication: A colour decision starts by naming the role, then the family. Off-palette or off-role is off-brand.

2. The non-negotiables

These are the choices that, if broken, make a surface not-Aleris.

(draft-xlat) We use only the named palette colours. Never an arbitrary hex, never a "nearly-petrol" or "slightly lighter orange." The palette is the brand. (Bounded instances of this one rule: "cream" does not exist — use sand 50. Teal — the former primary, once called "turquoise" — is not retired; it is a named palette colour at legacy tier. Petrol is primary in every market; teal is kept for a transitional period, mainly for its lingering presence in Norway. See principles/colour → Legacy colours.)
The page background is sand, never white. White is for surfaces lifted off the ground — cards, modals, input fields.
The accessibility rules that involve colour (never information by colour alone; the contrast floors) are referenced, not restated — see [[accessibility-is-foundational]]. The sort routed them to a shared home so they live once, not once per page.

(Retired 2026-08-11: "No dark mode. Aleris uses light interfaces — digitally, in print, and in physical space." Open item 1 below already questioned whether this belonged here; the answer turned out to be no, and not for a branding reason — respecting a user's local display settings (dark mode, high contrast, dynamic text size) is a legal requirement, the same class of obligation as the accessibility rules above it. A positive rule is pending, from principles/colour.md or wherever it ends up living, not this file.)

Implication: These hold across every channel and composition. How the palette is distributed is contextual and lives in the essay; which colours exist, and where the ground sits, do not bend.

Detection of violation

PROPOSED — governance (signed off 2026-09-07, Torfinn).

In a token audit. Any hex not in the token set is a violation, caught automatically by the token-conformance check in data-products/tokens/tokens.test.ts (npm test). The token set of record is the --color-* declarations in data-products/tokens/aleris-tokens.css. Values already outside it are listed in the check as documented violations with a reason each, rather than being waved through. (This line asserted an automatic check from 2026-05-31 until 2026-07-30 while no such check existed. It is now wired.)
In design review. White page-grounds and off-role colour use are returned, with the failing element named. (Dark-mode surfaces are no longer a violation — see the retirement note under §2.)
On a live surface. A breach is logged against this file and fed back to principles/colour.md as evidence.

There is no override for the palette rule. (Changed 2026-07-28: WCAG-AA contrast is now a bright-line, not a calibrated default. The old note here rested on "one documented, mitigated exception – the white-on-orange button", and orange-600 removed that exception, leaving the default framing with no evidence behind it. The rule itself lives at [[accessibility-is-foundational]]; its measurable floor is the fitness check in data-products/tokens/tokens.test.ts.)

Origin

Harvest provenance: principles/colour.md and its English working copy foundation/en-draft/colour.md; sorted with documentation/constitutional-core-test.md, 2026-05-31.

External lineage: The constitutional-layer discipline from aleris-meta _TEMPLATE.md, via documentation/aleris-meta-alignment.md.

Open

"No dark mode" is the weakest of the three on the identity gate — a strategic constant more than a brand signature. Confirm it is constitutional rather than a strong default. Resolved 2026-08-11 — it wasn't a default question, it was a compliance one. Respecting a user's local display settings is a legal requirement; the rule is retired outright, not demoted. See §2's retirement note.
Accessibility placement. "Colour alone" and the contrast floors are routed to [[accessibility-is-foundational]]; confirm that shared node is the home (this is Open #3 of the sorting test).
Contrast as a calibrated default – where its fitness function lives (a qualities/ility node). Resolved 2026-07-28/30. Contrast was promoted to a bright-line, and the question of where the fitness function lives is answered by it being both: the rule is constitutional, and the measurable floor is data-products/tokens/tokens.test.ts. A machine-checkable floor is a fitness function, so it needed no separate node. Recorded as resolved rather than deleted so the reasoning stays visible.

[[principles/colour]] — the essay: palette tables, roles, composition, full accessibility guidance
[[accessibility-is-foundational]] — the shared accessibility non-negotiables
[[constant-and-contextual]] — the palette is constant; its composition is contextual

Pointers redirected 2026-09-06. This page was written to sit above a principles/colour.md essay that was never built — principles/ holds two files and that is not one of them. Every reference to it now points at principles/colour.md, which is accepted, publishes, and carries what this page promises: the palette tables, the per-family roles, Pantone and CMYK, Legacy colours including teal, and the full accessibility guidance. The principles/ layer stays a later refactor (board card 133); this page is complete as it stands rather than sending a reader to nothing. (2026-09-07, Phase 0 step 4: the essay now exists at that path — the Foundation page moved there, so every pointer on this page resolves as first written and the redirect above is history. The layer question in card 133 is answered by the map that moved it.)