Same surface, same shapes — only the committed hue changes. The committed dot appears on every resolved row, on team-state labels, and as the largest color moment on the plan (the committed record). Judge it here, then check the grayscale strip: with hue removed, both must still read by shape alone (PL-4).
| Criterion | Winner | Why |
|---|---|---|
| PL-6 · no health/likelihood readthe load-bearing boundary law | Navy | Green is the universal "healthy / on-track" signal — the exact semantic PL-6 forbids. Navy carries no health connotation, so the law can't be accidentally broken by a designer later reaching for the "success color." |
| Accessibility · red-green CVD~8% of men can't separate the pair | Navy | committed-green sits next to danger-red on the same surface — the single worst confusion pair. Navy vs red is highly separable for all CVD types. (Shape still backstops both, but hue shouldn't fight the user.) |
| Brand coherence"navy is the one meaningful color" | Navy | Navy keeps the system at one saturated hue + two reserved signals. Green adds a 4th hue family, diluting the thesis that #2E369B is the color that means something. |
| Verb non-valorization (PL-5 spirit)commit isn't "the good button" | Navy | Green frames committed as "the win," subtly ranking it above counter / condition / reroute — undercutting the honest-answer economy, where a condition is an equally legitimate outcome. Navy keeps committed factual, not celebratory. |
| Instant conventional legibilityfirst-contact, no learning | Green | Green dot = done reads with zero learning. Navy-committed must be learned once (the word "committed" and the shape carry it meanwhile). This is green's one real, honest advantage. |
| Positive affect / warmththe "trustworthy" brief | Lean green | Green adds a spot of life. But warmth already comes from the paper and ink, and "trustworthy" here is better served by restraint than by a reassurance color. Marginal. |
Navy wins on every load-bearing axis — the two that are actually laws (PL-6 and accessibility) both fall to navy, and they don't trade off against taste. Green wins only on learnability, which is real but one-time and already cushioned by the word + the shape.
The tie-breaker isn't visual, it's structural: if there is no green in the system, PL-6 can't be violated by a future hand. A "healthy green" sitting in the token set is a loaded gun for the on-track surface the product spent its whole thesis refusing. Navy removes the gun.
One weakness to design around, either way: the committed navy dot must never read as a clickable affordance. In a status column beside a plain word it doesn't — but I'd keep interactive-navy to controls/links and let the state glyph stay a small filled mark, so the two navies never collide in one row.