Ten directions

Risograph

Flat spot inks on off-white stock, and where two of them lie over each other you get a third colour free. The lesson is in the inks themselves: riso blue is a mid-dark blue, not a cyan, which is exactly the value rev01 has none of.

What it costs · Four inks instead of two, a stock that is not our paper, and a grain over everything. It is a print process pretending to be a screen, which is either the charm or the problem.

And where two of them lie over each other

Three more colours out of four inks, with no token for any of them. This is the only direction here that gets a colour for free.

Two inks

The discipline of a two-colour press: ink, one spot colour dark enough to be a mark, and nothing else. Every other tone is a screen of one of the two.

What it costs · Cyan and yellow lose their jobs, or keep them only as blocks. A screen is a tint by another name, which rev01 forbids outright.

One more value

Keep all six, add the one thing missing: a dark member of each brand hue. Cyan stays the block and the highlight; deep teal and ochre do the marks.

What it costs · Two new tokens, and "one cyan, full strength or not at all" has to be rewritten. The smallest change that makes colour work on paper, and the one that costs the most character.

Ink first

Change the ground, not the palette. Data lives on ink, where cyan is 14 : 1 and yellow 12.5 : 1, and the page keeps every value it has.

What it costs · Nothing in the palette, and a black block on any page that carries data. The site stops being paper with ink on it in the places that matter most.

Newsprint

No hues at all. Tone is the density of a screen of ink, the way a newspaper does it, so the four steps of a value scale are four dot sizes rather than four greys.

What it costs · Honest with the no-tints rule, because a screen is dots and not a tint, and it gives up colour in data entirely. The most conservative direction here.

Industrial signage

The colours a machine already wears: safety red, hazard black and yellow, and the blue of an instruction plate. Chosen dark enough to be marks, not decoration.

What it costs · Red means something in every other system on earth, so it cannot be series one. It suits the machine and it looks nothing like the banner.

Brick colours

The machine sorts these. LEGO's own red, blue, green, yellow, black and white as the data palette, at the values the plastic actually is.

What it costs · Three of them work on paper, and yellow does not. It is the one direction where the colour and the subject are the same thing, and the one most likely to be mistaken for a toy.

Blueprint

A drawing ground: white and pale cyan lines on a mid-dark blue, the way a cyanotype prints. The technical drawings we already make, inverted.

What it costs · A blue page is a strong claim, and it only suits the pages that are about the machine as an object. Both brand colours work on it untouched.

One signal

Everything is ink and the two greys, and exactly one saturated colour exists, spent only where something must be noticed. Never a series, never a fill.

What it costs · One new token and a rule about rationing it. Charts stay monochrome, which is what they already are, and the colour is worth something because it is rare.

Thermal

Receipt paper: a warm off-white, a soft black that was never quite black, and the one red a thermal head can make. Cheap, industrial, and legible by construction.

What it costs · Warm paper, which every picture on the site was shot against a cool one. Two values and a lot of character for very little.