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Designing with oklch
Perceptual lightness means a palette that stays even when you shift the hue. It also means fewer muddy greys.
By Nadia Brandt5
Hex codes are a habit, not a decision. They describe how a screen mixes light, which has almost nothing to do with how a person sees a colour.
The useful part
In oklch the first number is lightness as the eye reads it. Hold it steady, sweep the hue, and every colour in the set carries the same weight. Do that in hex and your yellow will glare while your blue disappears.
Building a ramp
Pick a lightness scale first and treat it as fixed. Then choose hue and chroma per family. Suddenly a dark theme is a subtraction rather than a second palette drawn from scratch.
The syntax looks strange for a week. Then the old way looks strange forever.
