Job colours
Every job in Hire the agent has a colour, so you can tell a fix from a test at a glance. This is how the colours were chosen.
The rules
- The colour follows the job's type, the first word of the job: Fix: …, Add: …, Test: …. Any new job is coloured automatically.
- Status colours are never job colours. Green means the tests passed. Red means they failed. Orange is FAF's own mark.
- Retrying isn't a colour. When the agent iterates, the card keeps the job's colour and adds ↻ round 2: it's still the same job.
- Borrow what people already know. Where developers have a colour habit, use it.
- Spread the hues. Colours that sit close together blur at a glance and in video.
- Readable in light and dark mode. Where a colour is too pale for text (yellow on white), the text uses a darker tone of it.
The palette
| Type | Colour | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fix | rose | GitHub's "bug" label is red, but red already means "failed", so the nearest colour that still reads as a bug. |
| Add | cyan | GitHub's "enhancement" label is cyan. |
| Test | yellow + black | A crash-test dummy: testing is what it's for. |
| Upgrade | purple | Levelling up: purple is the "epic" tier in games. |
| Refactor | slate | Neutral grey: the behaviour doesn't change, only the code. |
| Docs | blue | GitHub's "documentation" label is blue. |
Options we tried
| Palette | Verdict | |
|---|---|---|
| A | cyan, blue, violet, indigo, magenta, slate | Rejected: four of the six are blues and purples, which blur together. |
| B | cyan, blue, violet, magenta, brown, slate | Better spread, but brown for Upgrade had no meaning (brown reads as "industrious"). |
| C | rose, cyan, yellow + black, purple, slate, blue | Chosen. Every colour has a reason. Yellow became possible once "iterate" stopped being amber. |
| C-magenta | Upgrade magenta, Fix moves to purple | Considered: magenta and rose are neighbours, and purple loses the "bug" feel for Fix. |
In both modes, next to status
Job colours have to stay distinct from pass and fail, side by side.