The case for one accent colour

Every few months a client asks for a secondary accent. Something for variety, they say. Something for the sales banner. We have talked nearly all of them out of it, and the ones we didn’t still send us screenshots asking why the page feels noisier.

An accent colour is not decoration; it is attention, bottled. One accent means every appearance is a decision — a chip, a rule, one word, one live element. The eye learns the rule in seconds and then follows it like a spotlight. Two accents means the spotlight has an understudy, and nobody watches an understudy.

Our own cobalt appears on this site perhaps thirty times across nine sections. Each instance was argued over. That argument is the discipline — the moment you can add an accent without a debate, the accent has stopped meaning anything.

So: one. Make it electric, make it scarce, and when someone asks for a second one, ask what the first one did wrong.