The color system that scales past your first redesign

A palette named after colors ages badly. The moment 'brand-blue' becomes green, every file in your codebase is telling a small lie.

Name by role instead: surface, foreground, accent, muted, destructive. The names survive rebrands because they describe what the color does, not what it looks like.

Perceptual color spaces make the rest tractable. Adjust lightness in a uniform space and a whole scale stays legible without hand-tuning every step.

The test of a system is a theme swap. If you can change one file and the product still feels intentional, the system is real.