Colour says which world a page belongs to

Frank, 2026-07-27. A page should announce its family before a word is read. eR services keep the beige they already have; changes to the eRegistrations platform go blue; every other family gets its own.

Why it matters. Frank opens dozens of pages a day across seven streams. Colour is the fastest signal a page can send, and it costs nothing. The 5-second test applies to belonging as much as to meaning: cover the text, and you should still know which world you are in.

The families

Family	What lives here	Paper	Surface
eR services	country boards, service boards, implementation plans, change registers for one service, service profiles	`oklch(0.99 0.004 95)` warm beige	`oklch(0.965 0.006 95)`
eR platform changes	concept notes and diagnostics about the platform itself, the register of changes to eRegistrations, platform change proposals	`oklch(0.98 0.008 250)` cool blue	`#ffffff`
FG Central and the harness	FG Central, the memory brain, the design library, skills and tooling pages	white `#ffffff`	white, separated by line and space
OpenGov	the future platform: eApproval, eRnext, SmartRules, the concept notes of the suite	`oklch(0.985 0.010 300)` soft violet	`#ffffff`
Citizen-facing pages	leaflets, law pages, anything a citizen reads	the country's own brand	the country's own brand
Private ventures	Filomy, SmartZones, and the rest	their own brand	their own brand

The tint is the paper, not the furniture. Cards, tables and text keep the same neutral treatment across all families, so the pages stay one system with one accent per family. A reader should feel the family, not be shouted at by it.

FG Central's own marks, settled 2026-07-27. Masthead: FG in deep bordeaux oklch(0.32 0.10 15), Central in a pale deep grey oklch(0.50 0.008 260), set small, as a mark rather than a headline. The waiting state is true orange oklch(0.68 0.20 45), #f76400: an earlier value at lightness 0.55 read as rust, because a hue can be orange and still look brown if it is too dark. When a colour looks wrong, check lightness before hue.

One family works the opposite way, on purpose (Frank, 2026-07-27). FG Central and the harness take white paper, and put the colour in the parts: the section marks, the state bands, the stream dots, the buttons, the small icons and arrows. A working board is read all day and lives or dies on how fast the eye finds a state, so its colour belongs on the things that carry meaning, not spread underneath them. The discipline is the same as everywhere else: one colour per meaning, never decoration.

Citizen pages and private ventures are exempt because they already carry a real brand, and a house tint would fight it.

Applying it

Set the family paper on body, keep surfaces near-white, and let the accent follow the family's hue.
One family per page. A page that belongs to two families belongs to the one whose reader it was written for.
New family, new row in this table, and say so in the reply that introduces it.

Related: formats/concept-note/concept-note.md §"The pages" for the head rules · kennedy/colour-*.md for how to vary a hue without breaking the system.