The colour, and the three places it lands
Decided: #C21A3A, solid. Dave's call on 11 Sep 2026, and the bench is kept as it stood when it was made. DQ's own red (#E8112D) measures 0.068 from H-E-B, which is inside the distance at which two dots stop being different colours to somebody glancing at a map — and H-E-B is 345 dots, the densest thing on there. #C21A3A clears every existing colour and still reads as DQ.
A half-and-half dot was benched and not taken. It works — in red and white it holds at every size, 5.2px included — and it is the only treatment that sidesteps the collision rather than negotiating with it. What it costs is that DQ becomes the first chain whose colour is not a colour: a gradient def wherever dots are drawn, a second value for text, and BRANDS changing shape in two files. Not worth it when one hex clears the bar. The controls are still here, and the finding underneath them is still true.
Dairy Queen dot
Candidates
Dot style
The second colour
| Against | ΔE (OKLab) | Reads as |
|---|
This is the one that decides it. A dot on the map is about five pixels across — r = 1.6/k in a 560-unit viewBox — and a two-tone dot has half of that per colour. Every size below is the real one, beside an H-E-B dot, which is the 345-dot neighbour a Dairy Queen dot has to be told apart from.
What it found, and it is not what pixel count predicted. A blue second half disappears — not because 2.6px is too small, but because the ground it sits on is blue. --bg is #00276D and --land is #0044A3, so a blue half dissolves into the map and the dot reads as a bitten-off red one. A blue ring is worse: it vanishes entirely and DQ reads as a smaller H-E-B, which is the one thing worse than looking the same. White holds at every size, 5.2px included. It is also the pairing on DQ’s own sign.
On the map, against its neighbours
A result card's chain stripe
Stephenville Dairy Queen
#1042 · 2765 W Washington St · Stephenville, TX
A rollup row on a drive
ΔE in OKLab is perceptual distance: roughly, below 0.10 two dots are the same colour to a reader glancing at a map, 0.10–0.20 is telling them apart on purpose, and above 0.25 is two colours nobody confuses.
The row that matters is whichever is worst, and it is highlighted. Clearing every other row comfortably and landing at 0.06 from H-E-B is not a pass — H-E-B is 345 dots and the densest thing on the map, so it is the one a DQ dot will actually be sitting next to.