Color terms in 30 seconds each
Plain-English definitions of the words you keep running into while picking a brand palette.
The signature hue that identifies a brand and drives main CTAs and navigation surfaces.
A supporting hue that complements the primary, used for less critical UI like tags, secondary buttons, and chart series.
A high-saturation contrast color used sparingly to emphasize one or two elements per screen.
The luminance ratio between two colors, used by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to measure legibility.
A palette built from a single hue, varying only saturation and lightness.
Three colors adjacent on the color wheel, typically within 30 degrees of each other.
Two hues directly opposite on the color wheel — for example blue and orange, red and green.
Three colors evenly spaced 120 degrees apart on the color wheel.
A base color plus the two colors adjacent to its complement.
Four colors arranged into two complementary pairs on the color wheel.
A six-character hexadecimal representation of an RGB color, prefixed with #.
A color model that describes a color by hue, saturation, and lightness rather than red, green, blue channels.
A named reference to a color value used in design systems and code, decoupled from the raw hex.
A tint is a color mixed with white, a shade is a color mixed with black.
A palette tuned to render legibly on a dark background, usually with desaturated brand colors and tinted neutrals.