Neon palette
Colors cranked so far past normal saturation that they read as light sources instead of surfaces. The highlighter-on-black glow.
See it
What it is
A neon palette pushes chroma to the edge of what a screen can show and pairs it with a very dark ground, so the colors stop reading as painted surfaces and start reading as light sources. Think Day-Glo poster inks, rave flyers, arcade cabinets, 'Blade Runner' street signs, and every cyberpunk hero section since.
Reach for it when the design needs energy and the background is dark. The glow is a contrast trick, not a color property: a bright cyan on near-black looks lit, the same cyan on white looks like a swimming pool. Two or three neons against a deep neutral is the working recipe, usually helped along by a soft outer glow (blurred, same-hue drop shadow) and wide-gamut values in Display P3 or OKLCH, which reach further than sRGB hex can.
Gotcha: neon is terrible for body text. Saturated colors on dark backgrounds fringe and shimmer (chromatic aberration in your own eye), and pure #00FF00 on #000000 passes contrast math while being physically unpleasant to read. Keep neon for accents, borders, and headlines, and let a soft off-white carry the paragraphs.
Ask AI for it
Build this with a neon palette: near-black background (around #0a0a12), two accent hues (electric cyan and hot magenta) plus one off-white for text. For each accent, pick the lightness and hue you want in OKLCH, then find the highest chroma that still sits inside Display P3 at that lightness and hue rather than asking for maximum chroma outright. Ship each accent twice: the P3 value in a color-gamut media query and a gamut-mapped sRGB hex fallback, and verify both versions actually render as intended. Give the accent elements a soft same-hue outer glow (large blur radius, low opacity box-shadow) so they look lit rather than filled. Keep neon on headlines, borders, and small accents only; body copy stays off-white.