The small labels on cards and badges are now dark enough to read

A lot of small text on the site is coloured to match the thing it labels, and printed on a pale wash of that same colour: the type badge on a Skill Lab, the category chips and the closed marker on a critique, the beginner and intermediate levels on a learning path, a project's status, the "in progress" line on your learning page. It looks tidy. It was also too faint.

Ten of those labels are now darker. Nothing else moves — the buttons, fills and headings keep exactly the colours they had, because the problem was never the brand colours themselves.

Why that distinction matters is the interesting part, and it is a mistake worth owning. Earlier this month we darkened our blue and pink until white text sitting on them was comfortably readable. That worked, and it quietly guaranteed the opposite case could never work: contrast is symmetric, so a colour tuned to be just dark enough for white text on top of it is, by that very fact, not dark enough to be text itself on anything paler than white. Every one of these labels had been failing since that change, and our own colour test kept passing because it only ever asked the first question.

So the fix is a second, darker version of each colour, used only where the colour is the text. The test now asks both questions, for every tint each colour is actually printed on — and three of the ten were found this way rather than by the browser scan, because they only appear on a page or a state that scan does not reach.