Five official brand roles — Pine, Gold, Iron, Ink, Paper — each expanded into a real tint/shade ladder so two adjacent sections in the same family still read as distinct rooms. Two hexes below are load-bearing anchors lifted verbatim from the client's own official art, not approximated: pine-900 is the Brand Guide's primary green; pine-700 is the brighter rule-line green already used in the logo file itself.
Named for the pine trees in the shield and the piney woods setting itself. Anchored top (900, the Brand Guide shield fill) and mid-dark (700, the logo's own rule-line green) with real photography — pine-500 lands on the actual sage-forest green seen in the show's tree line.
The official swatch (gold-600, #CA9A38) only hits 2.6:1 contrast on white — fine for icons, borders, and large decorative numerals, but it fails AA for body text and links. Gold-900 is the same hue, deepened until it clears AA at 10.3:1, so "gold" can appear as readable text without betraying the brand's actual color.
A true, cool, zero-saturation grey, anchored on the Brand Guide's official #4D4D4D. Used for borders, muted captions, dividers, icon strokes — anywhere the logo's painted steel hardware is doing the talking.
Ink is the Brand Guide's near-black #1A1A1A — the wordmark color, used for headline and body text. Paper is a separate, warm neutral family pulled from the arena's khaki dirt and the weathered wood in the show barns — not the same axis as Iron. That's why paper and white can actually be told apart on screen: they aren't two points on one grey ramp, they're a warm hue at very high lightness versus true zero-saturation white.
Measured in CIE L* (perceptual lightness — what the eye actually judges "gap" by, not raw sRGB percentage). The official off-white sitting next to pure white measures a gap that reads as sameness on screen. This system's paper-100 is tuned to a gap wide enough to actually see.
| Pair | ΔL* (CIE Lstar) | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Official #F5F5F5 vs pure white #FFFFFF | 3.46 | Not a visible gap |
| paper-100 (#F4F1EC) vs white | 4.75 | Visible, deliberate gap |
| paper-200 (sunken) vs paper-100 | 4.15 | Visible step |
| paper-300 (sand band) vs paper-200 | 7.47 | Clearly a different room |
On White
Body text in Ink-900. A link in Gold-900 holds AA easily.
On Paper
Page background. Same text, same contrast math — paper is warmer, not weaker.
On Pine
Reversed text at 13.5:1. Gold-500 accent text at 7.1:1.
On Sand
The sand band, used sparingly — echoes arena dirt, never the default surface.