
By adding one to each of the left-hand character of each pair, we raise a color’s brightness while lowering its saturation. Raised to 100%, the once-neutral green gains vibrancy.Ī funny thing happens when we treat hex colors as if they were increments of ten. For example, below a middle green becomes decidedly black when reduced to 20% brightness. This makes a color run the gamut from murky to brilliant, but loses its character on either end of the scale. To brighten or darken a color, one’s inclination is often to adjust its brightness. Understanding hex colors lets designers do more than impress co-workers and clients by saying, “Ah, good shade of burgundy there.” Hex colors let designers tweak colors on the fly to improve legibility, identify elements by color in stylesheets, and develop color schemes in ways most image editors can’t. The closer a hex color’s sixteens places are, the more neutral (i.e. To judge this color, we need to examine the ones (7, 0, and 5). Tens in the second example (9, 9 and 8) are very similar. This would provide us with a warm violet color. The example above has enough difference among its sixteens place to make the color easy to guess - lots of red, some blue, no green. That is, it’s hard to see the difference between 41 and 42 easier to gauge is the difference between 41 and 51. In most cases, one can read a hex number by ignoring every other character, because the difference between the sixteens place tells us more than the ones place. These shorthand codes provides brevity in code. Thus #fae expands to #ffaaee and #09b really means #0099bb. Hex numbers that use only three characters, such as #fae, imply that each ones place should match the sixteens place.
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For example, because 00 is a lack of primary and ff is the primary at full strength, #000000 is black (no primaries) and #ffffff is white (all primaries). A, B, C, D, E, and F after 0–9 makes an even 16, not unlike jacks, queens, kings and aces in cards.īeing mathematical, computer-friendly codes, hex numbers are strings full of patterns. To reach colors brighter than 99 with only two characters, each of the hex numbers use letters to represent 10–16. In the example above, 97 overwhelms the red color, 05 the green color and 15 the blue color.Įach pair can only hold two characters, but #999999 is only medium gray. The higher the numbers are, the brighter each primary color is.

Each pair controls one primary additive color. The first character # declares that this “is a hex number.” The other six are really three sets of pairs: 0–9 and a–f. To make sense of #970515, we need to look at its structure: Hex numbers represent these combinations with a concise code. Pixels on back-lit screens are dark until lit by combinations of red, green, and blue. Breaking Hexadecimals Into Manageable Bytes Designers who understand how hex colors work can treat them as tools rather than mysteries. Like any computer language, there’s a logical system at play. That is, 16,777,216 unique combinations of exactly six characters made from ten numerals and six letters - preceded by a hash mark.

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When computers name a color, they use a so-called hexadecimal code that most humans gloss over: 24-bit colors. Understanding Color Concepts And Terminology.A Simple Web Developer’s Guide To Color.Color Theory for Designers: The Meaning of Color.What exactly is “electric lime”? Names and precise shades vary - unless you’re a computer. We label them “indigo”, “jade”, “olive”, “tangerine”, “scarlet” or “cabaret”. To be more precise, it could be “sky blue”, “ocean blue”, “jeans blue” or even “arc welder blue”.ĭescriptions vary with personal taste and in context with other colors. Name a color, and you’re most likely to give a misleading impression. The trouble with a color’s name is that it never really is perceived as the exact same color to two different individuals - especially if they have a stake in a website’s emotional impact. To be more precise, it could be “sky blue”, “ocean blue”, “jeans blue” or even “arc welder blue”. The trouble with a color’s name is that it never really is perceived as the exact same color to two different individuals - especially if they have a stake in a website’s emotional impact.
