Naming Colors in Design Systems

The Best Way to Name Colors that Everyone Will Understand

Hi there 👋 I'm Michelle and welcome to Edition 63 Design Insight. A weekly newsletter for creatives with a focus on design.

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📃 3 Articles

Naming colors in design systems

The article in 3 ideas:

1. The best way to name colors in your design system is with the format colorName - contrastValue i.e. blue-500, green-100. This is how Tailwind CSS names its colors.

2. When names are wacky or reference some current trend, it makes it difficult to determine how the colors work in the design system or to find them in the first place.

3. Only use special names for important brand assets or for color palettes with a specific use.

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How To Use Parkinson's Law To Your Advantage

The article in 3 ideas:

1. Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time you give it. If you give yourself a day to do a 2-hour task, the task will increase in complexity and therefore take the day to complete it.

2. People tend to overestimate the time it takes to complete a task, likely because they want to leave some buffer room, or they aren't sure how long it will take.

3. This law can be used to your advantage by reducing the time allotted to complete a task to the bare minimum to complete it effectively. This will enable you to realize that you can "work smarter not harder" and complete tasks in less time.

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On Creativity: My modest guide to being more creative by Jeff Zych

The article in 3 ideas:

1. Quality comes from quantity. When creating anything, generate as many options as you can. This will test your creative muscle and let you explore lots of different possibilities.

2. Look at work that inspires you and work you think is great. You can learn what works and what doesn’t by doing this as well as gathering inspiration to try for yourself.

3. Try something completely different. Look at something upside down, listen to something backward, or use your non-dominant hand.

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🔨 2 Tools/Resources

Data Viz Project ➜

• A collection of data visualizations for your inspiration.

Ingradients ➜

• Hand-picked mesh gradients for your next design project.

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🎨 1 Design Tip

Design Tip

Denislav Jeliazkov @DenisJeliazkov

You should strive for having coherent experiences by having familiar icons, colors, menus, etc. Standardizing the way your information is conveyed would ensure people are able to apply knowledge from one action to another and will lower their cognitive load.

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📰 Classifieds

• Business Card Template (Figma) - A template I created for making my new business cards. It worked really well so I decided to share it on Figma.

Do you want to see your ad here? Buy a classified ad spot

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In case you missed it, here are last week's most popular links:

1. Thinking in mental models ➜

2. The Pomodoro Technique ➜

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You’ve reached the end of this week’s edition of Design Insight. Thank you for reading, I truly hope you found value in the design insights I shared today.

Til next week 👋

Michelle

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