When choosing colors in code, the standard is to use hex or rgb codes where #F30F30 ends up meaning a nice RED color. Another option to use semantic color names like Red, Blue, Purple, Dark Blue, etc.

While the best practice is to use hex or rgb because they are more standardized and work-with-able, the semantic ones are a fun way to make the, at first, intimidating world of code, a little more accessible.  

It turns out that, in addition to the standard colors we learned in preschool, there are a lot of--let's say--creative names, which remind us that tech people have a sense of humor and like to leave clues of it sometimes. We noticed things take a decidedly American West theme in the red-yellow spectrum :)

Here are some of our favorites:

Salmon Light and Dark

LightCoral

IndianRed <---yikes!

Tomato 

LemonChiffon

PapayaWhip

Moccasin

PeachPuff

Cornsilk

BlanchedAlmond

NavajoWhite

BurlyWood

Chocolate

SaddleBrown

Honeydew

MintCream

GhostWhite

OldLace

Going from the wide-eyed world of Peachpuff fuzz to the exhilarating world of #3C332E maturity

Eventually as one delves deeper into web design, projects will demand subtleties not afforded by the relatively small rolladex of semantic web colors. A simple example is having a graduated gradient. Another example if you were going to perform a mathematical operation on a color, like say with a preprocessor, semantic colors take a backseat to their integer-based counterparts as with:

@coolcolor=lighten(#CCC, 20%);

Related

The full list of x11 web colors can be found here!

Join The Conversation
Shannon 01/26/2015 05:40 PM
test to self
Post A Reply
Joanna Test 01/13/2023 11:34 AM
Testing current blog comments settings
Post A Reply
Post A Comment