Ten treatments of the same header. Structure, labels and all three mega panels are identical in
every one — only cosmetics change, so the comparison is about weight, colour and voice, not layout.
Hover a nav item in any variation to open its panel. Every colour value is read off the live site
unless a variation says otherwise. Internal working sheet, not a client deliverable.
Badges:Sourced uses colours already in the live CSS ·
Stretch stays in a live colour family but goes further than anything on the
site · Outside the plan introduces a colour the client does not have,
which the brief currently rules out.
1Ivory & GoldSourcedThe current home-A-v1 header. White ground, teal wordmark, solid gold button. The control.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
3Editorial SerifSourcedSerif wordmark, small-caps nav, gold demoted to an accent, CTA drawn as a teal outline. The ‘law firm as publisher’ reading of elevated.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
Braver colour — 6 to 10
What the plan says, checked before building these. The brief is explicit on three
points. (1) “No new palette invented from scratch” — this is a redesign of the client's
existing brand, not a rebrand, and a rebrand was not sold. (2) “More than one accent colour per
screen” sits in the Do not list, under the heading of the “busy and dated” treatments the
client named as the problem. (3) The Brand Kit has not been pulled from SharePoint yet, so
no confirmed brand colours exist at all — every value here is read off the live site as reference.
So, against your three colours:dark blue is fine — navy #112337 is
already in the live CSS for dark bands and overlays, so variant 6 uses the client's own colour rather
than a new one. Brand blue and green are not in the client's palette at all — the only
live blue is #0098f4, recorded as incidental, and green appears nowhere. Variants 8, 9 and 10
are therefore genuinely outside the current plan and are labelled as such. They are worth looking at
anyway, for one reason: if the Brand Kit turns out to contain a real brand guide, it may widen the
palette — and nobody has opened it. That makes “pull the Brand Kit” the blocking question here,
not “which colour do we like”.
6Business Blue barSourcedBUSINESS #027CA1 — a real brand colour, and the answer to “is there a brand blue?”. Brighter and more modern than NIGHT while staying inside the system. Check white type on it at its real size; it passes at large sizes only.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
7Freedom tintSourcedFREEDOM #93BCCD as a light ground with NIGHT type — brave without going dark. FREEDOM is a ground colour, never body text, so all type here stays NIGHT.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
8Brand gradient groundSourcedThe kit's own blue radial gradient, rebuilt in CSS. This is the brand guide's stated preference for the logo: “it should be on white or bright brand gradient backgrounds”. Costs nothing to serve and needs no photograph.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
9Forest GreenOutside the planDeep green #10493a. The kit confirms it: green is not in the brand system — the six brand colours are two blues, a light blue and three yellows. The argument for it is that green reads growth and money, which is what this firm sells. The argument against is that it is an invented brand colour, and now we know that for certain.
Grow Your Business Without Growing Your Legal Anxiety
Experienced, proactive legal counsel for growing companies, without the cost of a full-time legal department.
10Sage LightOutside the planGreen as a ground rather than a statement. Same objection as 9, lighter treatment — kept only so the green idea can be judged in both weights before it is dropped.
