Intuitive way of understanding hexadecimal html color codes?

Question

Is there an intuitive way, or a good mnemonic, for understanding the correspondence between colors and their hexadecimal values?

Answer 1

Hexadecimal colours are of the form #RRGGBB where RR is red, GG is green and BB is blue. Since they're hexadecimal they range from 00-FF. It should be fairly easy from that to gauge roughly what kind of colour you're dealing with for example #FF12A3 is going to be fairly red.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you mean, but I always remember that it is an RGB colour: The first two digits are for red, the second pair is for green and the las ones are for blue.

like this: #RRGGBB

And of course trying to remember that lower numbers give darker coulours.

If you are looking for some way to remember the colour code for orange, I'm afraid you are out of luck. I always need to look that one up...

Answer 3

Break the colour up into a triplet of values that represent red, green and blue. The higher the hex value in each segment then the more of that colour there is. So #000000 is black, #FF0000 is all red, #FF00FF is purple etc.

Answer 4

You just have to remember that the scale is 00 (no color effect) through FF (full color effect) and the three parts of the triplet are red, green and blue.

000000 is black (i.e., no color) and FFFFFF is white (mixing all three primary colors).

The hard bit is remembering the mixtures, which I use the following mnemonics for:

• Really good yams: Red + Green = Yellow (potatoes are my favorite food).
• Really bad prunes: Red + Blue = Purple (I really hate prunes).
• Good/bad apples: Green + Blue = Aqua (I'm indifferent about apples).

Obviously, you may have to come up with your own mnemonics if you food tastes differ from mine :-). But I find that's the easiest way for me.

Then it's just a matter of varying the quantities to add a little more red or little less blue and so on. I generally only use values of 00, 40, 80, C0 and FF since that gives you a 125-color palette to choose from and I don't want an abundance of choices to slow me down.

Answer 5

Just think of it as mixing paint.

There are the three components RR, GG, BB, (RRGGBB) which can be mixed with different strengths. Remember that 00 is lowest strength, and ff is highest.

For example, we know that 000000 will be low strength on all colors and will be black. Likewise, ffffff is highest on all three color components, and will be white.

You can add or remove color by making one part stronger or weaker. For example, start with black 000000, and add a little red as 330000, or add a little blue with 000033. Add both and see what happens 330033.

Add a LOT of red, with ff0000. Or add a medium amount of green for 006600.

If all three components are close to the same strength, they cancel each other out and you have grayscale, which will be light or dark depending on the strength of the colors. So 000000, 333333, 666666, 999999, and ffffff are black, dark greys, ligher grays, and white.

If you take a medium gray, and add a little blue, you end up with a bluish grey, like 888899. Red, green, and blue almost equal, so almost grey, but with a bit more blue. You can experiment with them a bit.

One really great tool for viewing color codes is this (small and free):

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html

Hope that helps!

Answer 6

Well, monitors use an 'RGB' colorscheme. The order of the colors in the hexadecimal number is RRGGBB. So just remembering the name of the colorscheme tells you what goes where. Then you can parse the #RRGGBB as three numbers RR, GG and BB.

The higher the number the brighter that particular component.

Then you just need to remember the additive color wheel from grade school. ;)

Answer 7

You need to get your head around three distinct things here.

1. Reading and writing numbers in hexadecimal. This just takes practice and familiarizing yourself with it. Color codes range from 00 (zero) through FF (= 255), so spend a little time (using calc.exe in Scientific mode, maybe?) picking a number and trying to guess what it'll be in hex, and vice versa. Counting in decimal is probably second nature to you; counting in hex is the same concept, with different symbols and rules.

2. How to read an RGB colour code as three component values. RGB codes are either written as three digits (#FFF) or six (#FFFFFF). In the first case, each digit is a single colour component; red, green, then blue. 0 = empty, F = 'full' (maximum). The second is the same but the additional digit gives you a much wider range of tones because you have 256 possible intensities for each component instead of 16.

3. Knowing the RGB colour model. Your primary colours are red, green and blue. Your secondary colours are yellow (R+G), magenta (R+B) and cyan (G+B). Increasing all the values makes the colour lighter; decreasing them all makes it darker. Pure greyscales will have three equal components - e.g. #ddd, #222. Tint greys by nudging one of the colour values up a bit - #866 will give you a dark grey with a hint of red. This bit you just have to learn through experience. Play with it. Get a tool like Instant Eyedropper and use it to find the hex values of known colours.

Getting it exactly right is very, very hard, but it won't take more than a couple of days before you can say "right... I want orange, which is somewhere between red (#F00) and yellow (#FF0) on the colour wheel, so let's try splitting the difference and use #F90... hmm, bit dark, so let's nudge the G and B components up a bit... #FA2... got it!"

Answer 8

I think it's useful to get a good HTML color chart and keep it by your desk. I like the Visibone mouse pads and posters.

Answer 9

Remember:

1) The order of the hex-pairs are Red, Green and Blue. This is easy to remember since we aften talk about RGB-color, RGB screens and so on.

2) The numbers should interpreted as the amount of light in the color. So 00 is no light, while FF is maximum light in that color.

3) I all three colors are of the same level, they "cancel each other out", so we get a greyscale color. 00 is minimum light, så if all three colors are 00 we get no light - ie. black. If all three colors are max-light (#FFFFFF) we get white, Any number in between is grey.

Answer 10

I manage to create colors intuitively now (with some trial and error, of course), having practiced them a lot. Playing/using color mixers (with red/green/blue sliders for example) helps in understanding relationships. Now, I know that FFFF00 is yellow, FF00FF is magenta, 00FFFF is cyan, plus of course primary colors, and all others colors are in between.