Luis shares good tips and thoughts on using, naming, and organizing color variables, as well as setting up modes for themes. Additionally, he summed up all of the above into a Variable starter kit on the Figma Community.

Did you know that you can use math inside color values in Figma? Really cool.

Denislav Jeliazkov from UI Learn shows quick ways to improve the use of colors in interfaces.

You know I love color tooling! GitHub has been doing some excellent work on its color system, which is the foundation of the Primer design system. Last year they wrote about building internal color tooling for theme building, and in the new post, they share their process for making contrast changes in both default light and dark modes as part of GitHub’s larger accessibility strategy.

So happy to see that this geeky tool hit 2nd place as a Product of the Day at ProductHunt last week! Its author Roman Shamin collaborated with me on Accessible Palette in the past and built a few other projects featured in this newsletter. While the UI of the color picker may seem complicated at first, its guiding principle was educating and demonstrating new concepts underlying the OKLCH and LCH color spaces. It’s my go-to tool for working with these color spaces and wide-gamut P3 colors.

For additional context, see an in-depth article OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL by Roman’s co-author on using OKLCH color space in code, as well as my article Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems on using perceptually uniform color spaces as a foundation for design systems.

Figma always supported #RGB and #RRGGBB CSS syntaxes in color fills, but now you can also use rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), and hsla(). Pretty neat!

This new color palette generator took ​“design Twitter” by storm last week, and for a good reason! ​“Poline is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes.”

While Figma doesn’t have native support for color tokens yet, Luis kicks off a discussion of how they might work in the future. His approach is similar to how I usually organize color tokens in CSS, so hopefully that will be the direction they take!

A preview of a new Figma plugin that offers Paper-like paint mixing. That demo brought so many memories! Paper used to be my go-to drawing app on the iPad a decade ago. Love to see some of its smart UI elements getting a second life as Figma plugins.

Dan Hollick with a great thread on light and dark modes, perceived contrast, APCA, and why we tend to tint dark backgrounds blue.

A few solid tips and tricks on working with colors in Figma.

Dan Hollick explains how every color blending mode in graphic editors works.

Fons Mans shows how to create rich gradients without any plugins — like this one, for example.

Molly Hellmuth gives a few practical recommendations on creating a bulletproof color system.

I was looking for a plugin to clean up my file and convert all color values to matching color styles, and this plugin got the job done perfectly. Thanks to Dave Kover for the recommendation!

As you may have noticed, I have a soft spot for color tools supporting perception-based color spaces. Taras Brizitsky writes about the plugin Generator that he built with Alex Bourt. It’s a really cool idea and implementation — start with a color, apply a set of visual modifications and conversions, and generate an entire palette from it. Change the starting color or modifiers to update all generated colors. Awesome!

USWDS is an open-source design system for building accessible and mobile-friendly government websites. There is no official support for Figma yet, so Patrick Morgan added the color library to the Community and explained why he settled on this design system for his projects.

A new gradient generator inspired by Apple’s gradients.

Never noticed this before, but it’s such a nice touch! 👏

Cool update to a LottieFiles plugin: ​“Instantly change the colors of your animation. Apply your own custom colors, or try out our carefully curated preset color palettes.”