Designing with pastels without losing contrast

Pastel palettes get into trouble because the same quality that makes them pleasant — low saturation, high lightness — also flattens the contrast between foreground and background.

The reliable approach is to treat pastels strictly as surface colours and derive text colours separately, deepening the same hue until it clears 4.5:1 against the lightest surface you plan to use it on.

That gives you a palette with two tiers: airy tints for backgrounds, cards and accents, and one or two deep, desaturated versions of the same hues for body copy and headings. The result still reads as soft, because the hues agree.

Interactive elements need a third consideration: focus rings have to be visible against every surface in the set. A single mid-tone accent used consistently for focus solves this better than matching the ring to each section.