Uploaded April 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Color is the most relative medium in art. This fact makes working with color in design systems particularly challenging. Few people seem to want to claim to be an expert in color—perhaps because there’s an immensely deep amount to learn, or perhaps it’s because color is one of those things we hate to get wrong. Whatever the reason, color remains a contentious but often critical part of design.
I’ll be sharing my journey into color, from the technical challenges to how people respond to it. We’ll take a look at the efforts required in updating large scale web applications like Github, challenges in programatically generating colors, creating color naming conventions, color accessibility, and testing the interaction of color with other parts of a design system.
Color is the most relative medium in art. This fact makes working with color in design systems particularly challenging. Few people seem to want to claim to be an expert in color—perhaps because there’s an immensely deep amount to learn, or perhaps it’s because color is one of those things we hate to get wrong. Whatever the reason, color remains a contentious but often critical part of design.
I’ll be sharing my journey into color, from the technical challenges to how people respond to it. We’ll take a look at the efforts required in updating large scale web applications like Github, challenges in programatically generating colors, creating color naming conventions, color accessibility, and testing the interaction of color with other parts of a design system.
