Ridd with a step-by-step process for nailing dark and light modes in Figma. Love his way of thinking about counterpart colors on the opposite ends of the spectrum for specific use cases — texts, backgrounds, borders, and icons.

What an incredible introduction to color spaces! It starts by stating an important point that ​“color spaces are all constructs”, then proceeds to explain how useful one particular color space from 1931 is: ​“CIE XYZ turns color mixing problems and color matching problems into math problems. This has proven so useful that every modern color space is defined in terms of CIE XYZ. When we say that a system is ​“color managed” what we’re saying is: it’s built on top of CIE XYZ.”

Later it covers my favorite topic of perceptual uniformity and explains why it’s so hard to achieve — communicating meaning in data visualization, storing colors digitally, measuring contrast to ensure accessibility, and rendering even-looking gradients are all highly desirable use cases. Both CIE XYZ and sRGB can’t do it: ​“sRGB, the web’s dominant, default color space, was constructed in order to model a typical 1990s cathode-ray tube display.” On the first attempt to create a perceptually uniform space: ​“Whereas every color theorist before Albert Munsell (and many, after him) worked from the ​“frame in”, trying to cram all visible colors into a regular shape like a wheel or a sphere or whatever, Munsell instead worked from the ​“content out”, trying to create even intervals between adjacent colors and letting each ​“branch” extend as far as it could before he reached some limit of saturation. The resulting solid resembles a lumpy, lopsided spinning top.”

In the end, he explains why and how the Oklab color space proposed by Björn Ottosson in 2020 became rapidly adopted by the web platform and tools. (Not all tools yet — wink-wink!) Lab parameters in ​“a” and ​“b” are hard to work with, so OKLCH offers a user-friendly way to navigate the color space through Lightness, Hue, and Chroma. That’s the color space I rely on the most in my work.

Think you’re good at picking colors? Test your skills with this fun little game.

Some colors have established semantic uses — green for positive feedback, red for errors, and yellow for warnings. But what happens if your brand is based on one of them? Molly looks at how Netflix & Lego, Spotify & Quickbooks, and Hertz & McDonald’s handle this challenge. Her takeaway: either embrace the situation and use the brand color for semantic values, or introduce a new distinct color shade (i.e. orange for errors), but do not use two similar colors for different needs.

Alexey Ardov built a new app to explain color spaces visually. Make sure to enable DCI-P3 in Gamuts to compare it with sRGB, and drag an indicator to transform spaces from one to another. A really powerful tool for understanding different models and spaces.

A new plugin from Designer Advocate Hiroki Tani for generating color variables from the palette on canvas. It creates a collection from the section name, modes from nested frames, and variables from rectangles.

Luis wonders whether variables scoping provides enough semantic modification to justify removing explicit ​“background”, ​“border”, and ​“text” color variables. ​“What’s stopping us from maintaining a single, primitive set of variables, named as such (e.g. red-300) to match your developer’s framework, relying on scoping alone to bridge this gap?” (See the discussion in this thread on X.)

I also like this take from Nate Baldwin — primitive color palettes are inherently semantic because every lightness stop is knowingly created to be used for specific use cases. He supports this idea with examples from his work on Adobe’s Spectrum color palette.

The new page from Figma nicely explains different ways to build a color scheme (see also the book ​“Interaction of Color” by Josef Albers) but falls flat when it comes to color models and contrast — I wish this discussion didn’t stop at physics and involved human perception and modern tools. The generator also exists as a plugin, and that’s where it comes handy.

Great idea, but I wish this plugin would suggest the nearest color for a fill of the selected object and not just for the hex value. With some polish, this could be an essential linting step before handing mockups off to a developer.

Great thread explaining the ​“weirdness” of OkLCH by one of the authors of the new Harmony color palette. Here is something I never thought about: ​“In electronic displays, yellow, cyan, and magenta are products of shining two lamps – subpixels. The more light is emitted, the brighter we perceive the color. It means the max lightness of the yellow is much higher than the blue’s.”

Great update to the OkColor plugin letting you specify both absolute and relative chroma in colors.

I rely on Luis for thought-provoking organization and design systems insights. In this thread, he discusses a way to translate brand colors into primitive and semantic color scales. At work, I use two design systems — one made by a smaller team where the same designers control the brand, design system, and product, and another from a larger organization with these are separate functions. I can see how his approach of explicitly using brand colors in primitives can work well in larger orgs.

Something must be (hovering) in the air, as Ridd also shared his thoughts on selecting a color for the hover state with the right amount of saturation.

An interesting idea on using a composite style with an alpha channel for a hover state instead of creating variables for every variant. Won’t work in every case, but it was interesting to learn that the same overlay approach is used in Material 2.

New ways to manipulate colors and glyphs in Figma, coming directly from the team. #18: Two new blend modes that are most applicable to designing for iOS, as explained by Rogie — plus darker (linear burn) and plus lighter (linear dodge). Now we can do a classic dodge and burn! #19: Scrubbable inputs in color pickers. Use your mouse to drag or ​“scrub” individual fields to get precise control over your colors. #20: Alpha values in color inputs will be applied to the color’s opacity. #21: When outlining a stroke within a text node, the text is now converted into a group of vector nodes, one per text glyph.

Roman Shamin and Evil Martians keep building amazing tools for working with colors. Harmony is a beautiful color palette built with a primary focus on visual contrast and accessibility. It provides an equal contrast within lightness levels and consistent chroma (thanks OkLCH!), mirrored contrast pairs for light and dark modes, P3 gamut support, and Figma variables support. A great example of how a modern color palette should be built. Make sure to read Roman’s thread with all the nitty-gritty details of building this palette.

Luis with an interesting approach to documenting use cases or ​“intentions” of specific color levels in a palette. The color scales documentation from Radix recommended in the comments is also a fantastic resource. See also Luis’ Documentation template for colors in the Community.

Molly Hellmuth with tips on the best ways to name, organize, use, and theme color variables.

New plugin for working with perceptual color and OKLCH color space! This initial release allows inspecting and manipulating color stops in gradients using the OKLCH color space — pretty useful if you have an existing gradient that needs a little tweaking. Bonus point for providing precise control over color stop positions!

An early beta of a new APCA contrast checker plugin from my friends at Evil Martians. Polychrom displays the contrast level between the selection and an automatically detected layer background or two selected layers with solid fills. It also offers text size recommendations for regular and bold font styles, following the APCA contrast-to-font table. Earlier this year I was looking for an APCA contrast checker to recommend in my Config talk and found all existing options lacking, so really happy to see this team building it!