Chasing color | Adam Stoddard

I’m a fan of side-quests; professional tangents that fuel your interest, sharpen your craft, and pay long-term dividends towards whatever your main quest is. I tend to have a few running at any point; some might last a few weeks, some off and on for years.

One of the latter is designing CSS color systems. It’s stuck around for a few reasons. Color is a powerful tool in the design toolkit, and designing a maintainable, flexible, malleable, adaptable color systems is hard (read; “fun to try and solve”). I also like like to keep things grounded in practical application, which means I’ve mostly pursued this side-quest in the context of websites I’m actively designing and building. In this case, that means my personal site, the website for Steady, and the latest iteration of my website starter, Grease. We’ll get to those in a moment. First, definitions.

What does an ideal CSS color system look like? My answer to this question has evolved along the way, but here’s what I think, today:

Leave a Comment