Frontier Software

Color

The arithmetic of colours

Hue

A color’s hue is an angle in degrees:

0° Red 30° Orange 180° Cyan

hue is the first argument for two similar CSS functions, hsl(hue saturation lightness) and hwb(hue whiteness blackness).

Separating the arguments with commas is considered legacy. Hue defaults to degrees and can be written verbosely 120deg with other angle coordinates available.

Saturation

This represents the saturation of the output color. Here 100% is completely saturated, while 0% is completely unsaturated (gray).

Lightness

This represents the lightness of the output color. Here 100% is white, 0% is black, and 50% is “normal”.

hsl(H 100% 50%) is the same as hwb(H 0% 0%)

Alpha

Both functions have an optional fourth argument ranging from 0 for fully transparent to 1 for fully opaque.

Munsell color system

Adding Colors

A Nerd’s Guide to Color on the Web