When FairwayPlan was first built, the site wore a clean mint-green palette. Bright, fresh, and unmistakably golf. It did the job. But as the product matured it started to feel a little light. More Bunnings garden centre than Kauri Cliffs. So the colour system was redesigned from scratch, this time drawing directly from the visual vocabulary of championship golf and from a Japanese colour reference book published in 1933.
The old palette
The original theme used a single family of minty greens built around a vivid primary of #2da362 . Clean and readable, but low on gravitas and light on meaning. Every element pulled from the same family: headers, badges, buttons, borders, all variations on the same mint. There was no contrast of intent, no way to signal danger, urgency, or prestige through colour alone.
What real golf courses look like
Stand on the 1st tee at Kauri Cliffs and take it in. The fairway stretching out is a deep, almost black-green. The ocean framing the left side is navy blue. The flag pin ahead is crimson red. The bunker sand is warm gold, almost ochre. Those four colours, dark green, navy, pin red and sand, are the real palette of championship golf. They each carry meaning. They earn their place.
While working through colour reference material, I kept coming back to Sanzo Wada's Dictionary of Colour Combinations. Wada was a Japanese painter and textile designer who spent years cataloguing colour harmonies from traditional Japanese art and craft. Volume one, published in 1933, documents 348 combinations drawn from kimonos, lacquerware and woodblock prints. What struck me immediately was how many of Wada's most repeated groupings map directly onto a golf course: deep forest greens beside warm ochre golds, cool indigo blues against earth tones, and dark crimson reds anchored by near-black greens. These combinations were not invented for software. They were observed and recorded from objects made to last.
The new palette
The redesign builds four distinct colour families, each with a clear semantic role.
Fairway green: the base
Deeper and richer than before. The primary green shifts from the bright mint#2da362 to a darker fairway #1a6b3f, with a near-black#0d3d22 for headings. The background moves from a cool mint-white to a warm parchment #f5f0e8, which Wada's first volume would classify alongside pale yellowed papers and natural linen: colours that recede rather than compete. The effect is that the green feels more intentional, more earned, because it sits against something warmer and quieter rather than against near-white.
Navy: water hazards
Every links course has water: the Tasman at Kauri Cliffs, the lake at Millbrook, the estuary at Paraparaumu. Navy blue is used for weather badges when conditions are poor, for coastal links-type course chips, and as a decorative accent in the hero section. In Wada's second volume, published in 1950 and drawing more heavily on European influences, deep indigo and prussian blue appear repeatedly alongside forest greens and warm earth tones. The pairing reads as serious and grounded rather than cold. That was exactly the quality needed for rainy-day weather indicators: informative without being alarming.
Pin red: tee markers and urgency
The red flag marking the hole. The coloured tee blocks on the teeing ground. Red has clear urgency in golf and in UI. It now marks Definite intent days in the trip wizard: you have committed to playing that day, full stop. Wada documented this dark crimson against deep green as one of the most structurally stable pairings in both volumes. It appears in samurai lacquerwork, in Meiji-era textile borders, in the embossed covers of formal books. The contrast is high enough to read at a glance and emotionally unambiguous. That is precisely what a “definite golf day” badge needs to be.
Sand: bunkers and prestige gold
Warm ochre gold. In the UI it serves two roles: prestige (the gold bar under each course card shows ranking from 0 to 100) and secondary actions (booking links, round number chips). It also fills the hero's stat numbers, things that should feel valuable rather than urgent. The gold and deep-green pairing is probably the most recurring combination across both Wada volumes, appearing in everything from ceremonial lacquer to kimono borders. Volume two extends it into European heraldic territory, where it carries connotations of craft and institution. For a platform built around New Zealand's most celebrated courses, that felt right.
The header goes dark
The stickiest change visually: the header is now near-black forest green (rgba(13, 26, 16, 0.96)), with a gold logo badge and pale parchment text. The dark header gives every page a strong top anchor and looks equally at home against the dark hero section and the warm parchment content below it. It also resolves the logo contrast problem entirely. Against a pale background the gold and green of the wordmark felt muted. Against near-black they read immediately.
Course type badges are now terrain-coded
Previously every course type badge was the same green. Now each terrain has its own hue drawn from its real-world environment:
- Links — navy blue (coastal, ocean-side)
- Parkland — forest green (tree-lined, inland)
- Mountain — deep sage (elevated, rugged)
- Inland — warm sand (open, dry plains)
What stays the same
The typography, spacing, card structure and overall layout are unchanged. The update is purely chromatic: swap the colours, keep the geometry. The UI feels premium now, but if you used it yesterday you'll find every button and form exactly where you left it.
Colour is the first thing people feel about a product. It happens before they read a single word. Wada understood this in 1933. The combinations he catalogued were not invented; they were distilled from objects people already trusted.
FairwayPlan now looks like it belongs beside the courses it helps you book. The palette is grounded in colour theory that predates digital design by nearly a century, and in the actual visual experience of standing on a championship fairway. Give it a try: plan a trip and see how the new palette holds up under a real itinerary.