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0030 — Tier A repainted as Washi & Ink / Konshi Sutra; accent moves to beni

Status: Accepted · 2026-08-16 · supersedes the accent clause of ADR 0012 · --oto-border/ --oto-border-strong values amended by ADR 0031 (2026-08-16, same day) · dark-theme accent (--oto-accent and siblings) further amended by ADR 0032 (2026-08-16, same day) — light theme’s beni accent and both themes’ neutrals are unchanged

ADR 0012 fixed the two-tier system — pastel chrome, saturated colour reserved exclusively for state — and picked a periwinkle (#5B54D6 light / #A6A0FF dark) for the Tier A brand accent, chosen because it sat far from every Tier B state hue.

Separately, the product’s marketing surfaces adopted a Japanese-Zen visual language: Washi & Ink for light (sumi ink on cream washi paper) and Konshi Sutra for dark (indigo manuscript paper written on in gold and silver ink), with sakura-branch and kumo-cloud motifs. Bringing the product UI’s chrome into that language means repainting Tier A’s neutrals (bg/surface/border/text) from a cool periwinkle-tinted grey to a warm washi/konshi one, and choosing a new accent to replace the periwinkle.

The obvious move — reuse the marketing palette’s gold (kincha #B8935A light / kindei #C9A668 dark) as the product accent — does not survive contact with Tier B. Gold sits at ~36-38° hue, which is the same hue lane as --oto-state-acked-solid (~36°) and close to --oto-state-expired-solid (~32°). ADR 0012’s whole argument for the periwinkle was “not adjacent to any state hue”; an accent that reads as amber in an alerting tool risks being misread as the acked state itself. Gold works for a marketing hero; it fails Tier A’s actual job.

Two changes, kept separate:

1. Tier A neutrals repaint warm. --oto-bg, --oto-surface, --oto-surface-raised, --oto-surface-sunken, --oto-border, --oto-border-strong, --oto-text, --oto-text-muted, --oto-text-subtle move from a cool periwinkle-grey cast to a warm washi-paper cast (light) / a konshi-indigo cast (dark). --oto-chart-grid moves with --oto-border, as before (it has always shared that value). Tier B is untouched — state fills/borders/text/solids keep their exact hex values in both themes; only the chrome around them changed colour temperature.

2. The accent becomes beni, not gold. --oto-accent (and -hover/-fill/-border/-focus) move to a beni crimson-pink — #B5305C light, #EC8CA6 dark — sitting at ~340° hue. That is the widest open lane on the hue wheel relative to all six state hues (nearest neighbour is firing red at ~3°, a ~25° gap; every other state sits 60-300° away). It keeps the sakura/beni family that carries the rest of the Zen language, without landing in acked’s or expired’s territory the way gold would have. Gold stays exactly where it already worked: the marketing site’s hero, wordmark, and spotlight glow, which have no Tier B system to collide with.

Every replacement value clears its §M.4/§M.5 contrast obligation with the same or better margin than the token it replaced — see the updated tables. --oto-state-*-solid vs --oto-bg rows were recomputed (foreground unchanged, background’s luminance shifted) and all still clear ≥ 3:1; the tightest, acked-solid on the new light --oto-bg, holds the same 3.2:1 margin the periwinkle palette had.

  • The product UI and the marketing site now share a coherent visual language (washi/konshi neutrals, sakura-family accent) without sharing literal token values — the product’s beni is more saturated and hue-shifted from the marketing gold specifically because Tier A here has a job (staying clear of Tier B) that the marketing site does not.
  • Every Tier A hex in tokens.css changed in both themes; every measured pair in SPEC §M.4/§M.5 that touches a Tier A token was re-measured, not just re-stated. contrast.test.ts and tokens.test.ts are the gates that would have caught a mismatch, and both were run green before this landed.
  • --oto-state-* (Tier B), --oto-chart-1…6, --oto-row-h, and the §M.8 type/radius scales are unchanged — this is a chrome-only repaint.
  • ADR 0012’s two-tier architecture and its “chrome never uses a state hue” rule are unchanged and, if anything, are the reason gold was rejected for Tier A in the first place.
  • Reuse the marketing gold (kincha/kindei) as the product accent. Rejected: ~36° hue lands on top of acked (~36°) and near expired (~32°). An accent that can be mistaken for a state colour defeats the entire premise of ADR 0012.
  • Keep the periwinkle accent, repaint only the neutrals. Considered, but leaves the product visually disconnected from the sakura/beni family that carries the rest of the Zen language on every other surface, for no reason stronger than “it already worked.”
  • Invert Washi & Ink’s light values to build the dark neutrals. Rejected on the marketing side for the same reason it’s rejected here: ink-on-paper depends on the paper being light, and a brightness-flip reads as chalk-on-slate, not indigo manuscript paper. Konshi Sutra’s dark neutrals were tuned independently, the same way the marketing palette was.