Hue, saturation & brightness (HSB / HSL)

Instead of thinking in red/green/blue mixes, the HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness — also seen as HSL, Hue-Saturation-Lightness) model describes color the way people actually perceive it. Hue is the base color itself — where it sits on the color wheel (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). Saturation is how intense or muted that color is — high saturation is vivid and pure, low saturation drifts toward grey. Brightness/lightness is how light or dark it is — from black up to white. This model is often easier to design with than RGB, because "make it a bit more muted" is a saturation change, not a guessing game across three separate red/green/blue numbers.

Hex codes: color as a short, exact code

A hex code (like #E07020) is a compact way of writing an exact RGB value in one string — two characters each for red, green, and blue, in base-16. Its whole value is precision and portability: a hex code pasted into a website's CSS, a design file, or sent to a developer always produces the exact same color, with zero ambiguity about what "orange" meant.

Named colors: convenient, but not exact

Named colors ("tomato," "navy," "forest green") are human-friendly labels mapped to a specific value in a given system (like the standard named colors in CSS, or a Pantone name in print). They're useful for communication — "make it more like tomato" is intuitive — but they are not a substitute for an exact code once production starts, because the same name can be implemented slightly differently across different systems. A named color is a starting conversation; a hex code or Pantone number is the actual instruction.

Halftone ("tram"): how print fakes continuous color

Offset printing typically only lays down a handful of ink colors (CMYK). To simulate the huge range of shades a photograph needs, printers use a halftone screen — known in many countries by the French-derived term trame — a pattern of tiny dots of varying size and spacing that, viewed from normal distance, blends into what looks like a smooth continuous tone. Up close, a printed photo is just a grid of dots; the illusion of smooth color is entirely due to how the eye averages small dots at a distance. This is also why scanning a printed halftone image and printing it again often produces an ugly moiré pattern — two dot grids interfering with each other.

Putting it together

  • Use hue/saturation/brightness to think and communicate about color changes intuitively.
  • Use a hex code (or Pantone number for print) as the actual, unambiguous specification.
  • Treat named colors as a starting reference, not a final instruction.
  • Remember that print reproduces color through halftone dots, not continuous ink — which is part of why screen and print color never match perfectly without proper conversion.