Replaced the homepage newsroom's featured+stack layout with a 6-card 3×2 blog grid, added excerpt previews pulled from post meta descriptions, and locked the gradient system to the inline brand palette.
Opened the session syncing MEMORY.md and PROJECT_LOG.md from the may 18–21 extended session. Patched BLOG_RULES.md to v4.1 (Claude Project behavior rules added, handoff format locked, agent-first FAQPage strategy added) and updated OPERATING_INSTRUCTIONS.md dateline to May 21 — recon-before-write and str_replace rules now locked on disk.
Main work: rebuilt the homepage newsroom from a 1-featured + 3-stack layout to a 6-card 3×2 grid. All internal blog links, no external Beehiiv dependencies. Each card has a 72px gradient header bar with a ghost keyword word and frosted pill tag. Card bodies carry title, excerpt pulled directly from each post's meta description, and date.
Spent several iterations resolving the gradient palette. Started with indigo as a universal dark anchor, worked through light-to-saturated and flat options, landed on saturated-light → deep-dark with each card owning its own color family. Search and agents shared an identical gradient string after the indigo-anchor pass, so the final courier used href anchors rather than gradient strings to target each card surgically.
#4DA3FF → deep blue #0C447C#FFD84D → dark amber #7A5500#22C55E → deep green #14532d#FFD878 → dark amber #7A5500#A899DC → deep indigo #3C3489#D4EAFF → deep blue #185FA5All tokens sourced from the inline brand palette in index.html. Rule going forward: no invented hex values in newsroom cards — dark end from --indigo family, light end from the five brand tokens (sky, yellow, green, drift lavender, gather amber).