Getting the palette right

Creating an identity for a whole town is tough; the outcome won't be for everyone, but it should consider everyone. Every resident, every age, every eye.

This was the reality behind our work with Bletchley & Fenny Stratford Town Council. One of the largest and most diverse communities in Milton Keynes: more than 21,000 residents spanning every age, background and interest; that's a lot of eyes to consider. The Council came to us to refresh its civic identity. With only a few stipulations: make something residents could feel proud to stand behind, put people before places and keep some consistency with the current green and yellow.

The brief was refreshingly clear about their recognised colours. Don't discard them. Don't assume they stay exactly as they are. Evolve them. Find richer, broader palettes with more personality and flexibility, but remember it's for the many, not the few.

We loved the tension in that. Creative freedom pulls one way, accessibility pulls the other. Get it right, we'll be dripping in mayoral chain. Wrong, something less shiny.

Making accessibility accessible

Whilst creating a refreshed palette for the civic identity, we found ourselves in a strange loop: creating colour schemes, testing the combinations one by one, discovering they aren't fit for purpose and then starting over. Most contrast checkers test one pair of colours at a time, in a fiddly little window that has nothing to do with the palette you're actually building. It works, sort of, but it's slow, and it treats accessibility as an add-on, after the creative decisions are already made.

We wanted the opposite. To see the whole system at once. Every possible combination, scored and ranked, updating live as we explored, so we could chase an idea and know in one glance if it was a bad one.

That tool didn't exist in a form that worked as part of the creative process. So, mid-project, we built it (with a little help).

Meet Palette Lab

A colour tool built to do one thing: keep your palette accessible without flattening the fun. It finds the widest range of colour that still clears the bar. So accessibility becomes the thing that expands what's possible, not the thing that shrinks it.

That reframing changes how a project feels. Instead of designing freely and then bracing for the accessibility audit, you design inside the standard from the very first colour. And you find there's far more room in there than you'd think.

It rates every core colour as text on light and dark surfaces. Optionally, it can provide a supporting palette - hue-tinted neutrals, soft pastels and deep shades - tuned to give you the most usable, high-scoring combinations. It stress-tests every pairing against WCAG 2 and APCA, then sorts them into clear tiers: AAA, AA and large-text-only (18+). So you can see at a glance which pairings carry body copy, and which are built for headlines.

It runs a colour-vision check, simulating how the palette reads for different types of colour blindness, and flags any pairs that become hard to tell apart.

Then it hands the decisions over cleanly: Adobe swatches (.ase), an SVG swatch grid, or a ready-to-use AI prompt. So the palette travels into the next stage of work without anything getting lost on the way.

For Bletchley & Fenny Stratford, the result was a palette that stayed grounded in the town's familiar green and yellow, but with the breadth, contrast and confidence to work everywhere for every resident it reaches.