The site changed colour this week. The old amber accent became neon blue on a blue-black ground, with a light ice-cyan beside it. The one warm thing left is the logo mark, which stays amber, and the warning colour, which stays orange so that it still means something.

Colour is the easy half. Three typefaces also became one. Saira now does body text, headlines and the place names, with a mono face for data. It has a width axis, so hierarchy comes from how wide and heavy the type is and not from switching fonts.

What took the time was everywhere the old colour was hard-coded: the speed and RPM gauges, the reverse camera, the landing film, the replay plots, the stats pages, the share cards, the favicon. The market and ad manager demos needed the same pass in their own code, and a few amber glows survived there because they were written in a form the first search did not match.

One small detail I liked: the filmstrip takes its colours from the photographs, and on the lightest one the new blue failed contrast. So that one place uses a lighter step of the same blue.