Articles on how colour works: how we see it, how to build a palette, contrast and accessibility, screens and print, and its history.
20 articles
Building a paletteContrast and accessibility
A brand palette works when every colour has a job. On screens, neutrals cover most of the page and your brand colour marks what people click. Here's where the 60-30-10 rule really comes from, how many colours you need, and why your brand colour may fail as text.
15 min read
How we see colour
Colour psychology is half real. People around the world agree on what colours mean, and that's well measured. The claims that colours change how you feel, perform or buy mostly faded when bigger studies tested them again. Here's which ones, why, and what to rely on instead.
18 min read
Building a palette
A tint is a colour plus white, a shade is a colour plus black, and a tone is a colour plus grey. The square in your colour picker is built from exactly those three mixes. Here's how to read it, why the words keep changing meaning, and why a tint can drift off hue.
12 min read
How we see colourBuilding a palette
Orange is the warmest hue and blue the coolest, and people everywhere agree on that. Everything in between is a comparison. Here's where research puts the line, why green and purple sit on it, and what that means for your palette.
11 min read
How we see colour
Every colour has three dimensions: hue, lightness and colourfulness. Your design app's hue, saturation and brightness sliders borrowed those names, but they don't measure them. Here's what each slider really does.
10 min read
HistoryBuilding a palette
The colour wheel wasn't invented once. Newton published a wheel of light in 1704, painters started a red, yellow and blue wheel in 1708, and the two still disagree. That's why your design tools can give different complementary colours.
12 min read
Screens and print
Your phone can almost certainly show your brand colour exactly, so something else is changing it. Here's how to spot the three usual causes: your phone's colour settings, a screen that stretches colour, and a file set to the wrong colour range. Plus a five-minute check and what to keep fixed.
13 min read
Screens and print
A screen makes its own light, but paper can only reflect it. About half of a standard screen's colours can't print on standard European coated paper, and about four in five can't on uncoated. Here's which colours lose the most, why blue can print purple, and why free hex-to-CMYK converters can make it worse.
15 min read
Screens and printContrast and accessibility
Reversing your colours turns a blue brand mustard, and even automatic dark modes turn yellows muddy and purples pink. A good dark mode is a lightness job first: near-black backgrounds, off-white text, and every accent re-picked lighter until it reads. Here's why blues soften and reds can stay vivid, with a recipe for Figma and Canva.
13 min read
Screens and print
A gradient between two good colours can turn grey, olive or dark in the middle. There are two separate causes, and web browsers still blend hex colours the old way. Here's which colour pairs are risky, and how to fix the middle in Canva or Figma without any code.
12 min read
Building a palette
Why light blue looks purple, and how to lighten a colour without changing its hue in Canva or Figma. Pale blues drift towards lavender for two separate reasons, your eyes and some older colour maths, and the fix is to steer the hue as you lighten, then check by eye.
12 min read
How we see colour
Pure yellow and pure blue both read 50% lightness in your colour picker, yet yellow gives off almost 13 times as much light as blue, as your eye counts it. Here's why the picker's numbers mislead, which lightness numbers match your eyes, why vivid colours still look lighter than their number, and which greyscale check to trust.
12 min read
Contrast and accessibility
The 4.5:1 contrast rule rests on a 1988 office-monitor standard, an allowance for older eyes and a fixed guess about room lighting. It's right most of the time, it never forbids your brand colour, and it flatters you in one place: light text on dark backgrounds. Where the number came from, where it slips, and whether to switch to APCA.
18 min read
Contrast and accessibility
Colour-blindness filters show the most severe form, which only about a quarter of colour-blind people have. The check that works is one you already know: keep neighbouring colours at least 3:1 apart in contrast, and never let colour be the only clue. Here's why, which pairs really break, and the palette that holds up.
19 min read
Building a palette
Complementary, analogous and triadic schemes are a good way to find candidate colours, but the experiments say they don't predict which pairs look good. Here's what two major studies found, why they disagree about complementary colours, and what to check instead.
16 min read
How we see colour
There's no single number for when two colours look different. The famous 'Delta E under 1 is invisible' table is one developer's own guess, expert estimates vary fifteen times over, and one unit covers 2,575 hex codes around a vivid blue but only 34 around mid grey. Here's what the number really means, and how to judge by eye instead.
18 min read
How we see colourContrast and accessibility
Your eye judges every colour against what surrounds it, so the same hex looks lighter on a dark page and darker on a light one. Thin lines and small text do the opposite. Here's why, how big the shift is, why a contrast checker can't see it, and what to do.
18 min read
History
Oklab, the colour maths behind OKLCH, began as a free blog post by Swedish engineer Björn Ottosson on 23 December 2020. Nine days later it reached the W3C. Within ten months CSS voted it in and Photoshop made it the default. Here's who carried it, and what the 'OK' honestly promises.
11 min read
HistoryHow we see colour
Every hex code is a point on a map drawn from the colour matches of 17 people in two London-area labs in the late 1920s. Here's who they were, why the numbers needed 'minus red', how the CIE fixed it in 1931, and why some new screens are starting to drift from it.
14 min read
History
Albert Munsell was a Boston painter who didn't trust colour names. He spent two decades turning what his eye saw into numbers, admitted which parts weren't his, and left a lopsided colour tree that others re-measured and soil scientists still use.
12 min read