Today, @wilsonminer and I wrote about our work on Stripe’s color systems over the past couple years. I’m so excited to share some of what we’ve learned along the way.
@wilsonminer I’ve been exploring color for a long time, from the adaptive color systems at @Medium to the tools and approaches we use at @Stripe today. This post is just the tip of the iceberg.
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe Color is deceptively complex—there are entire fields of study devoted to color perception. I guess you could say there’s more than meets the eye. (I’ll see myself out.)
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe The big takeaways? Eyes are weird. Use a perceptually uniform color model when working with color—don’t just stop at simple HSL. The WCAG accessibility spec only cares about contrast, not colorfulness (for good reason), but you can have both. Build tools when you can.
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe Unfortunately, the academic concepts of color perception rarely make the jump to design education or tools. So applying these concepts in our work is often a struggle—it’s hard enough to even know they exist!
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe But color’s complexity doesn’t mean it has to be impossible to understand. The tool we built is the result of integrating perceptually uniform color models directly into the design process. And we used this tool to teach everyone at @Stripe about color.
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe Thankfully, lots of teams across the industry are exploring color systems. The U.S. Web Design System’s color guidelines are a personal favorite of mine: designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/…
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe We’re excited to share our approach. I think there are some novel aspects to our work: how we visualize color palettes using perceptually uniform color models, our focus on tooling, and an emphasis on manually selecting colors rather than opting for a purely algorithmic solution.
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe Color is fascinating. These models aren’t perfect. In fact, they’re continually evolving. And there are so many variables we can’t control (monitor calibration, lighting, etc) and different areas to explore. Soon the internet won’t be limited to just sRGB (that’ll be fun).
@wilsonminer @Medium @stripe Thanks to @wilsonminer for going on this color journey (and listening to endless rants about color science); to @stubailo, our editor and shepherd; to @simmy, for the presentation that started it all; and to @majelbstoat, for encouraging me to write about color for years. 🙏
