Blog

    Practical guides on color, contrast and image processing for designers and developers.

    HEX vs RGB vs HSL: Which Color Format Should You Use?

    A practical comparison of HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV and CMYK — what each format is good at, where each one breaks down, and how to pick the right one for design work and CSS.

    Read more

    WCAG Contrast Ratios Explained: Where 4.5:1 Actually Comes From

    What the WCAG 2.1 contrast thresholds mean, how the ratio is calculated from relative luminance, when 3:1 is enough, and the common mistakes that fail an audit.

    Read more

    Building Color Palettes: The Five Schemes and When to Use Them

    Complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic and monochromatic schemes explained as hue math, plus how to turn a five-color scheme into a usable interface palette.

    Read more

    A Practical Guide to CSS Gradients: Linear, Radial and Conic

    How the three CSS gradient types differ, why your gradients look muddy in the middle, and the syntax details that trip people up — angles, color stops, and hard edges.

    Read more

    PNG vs JPEG vs WebP: Choosing an Image Format

    What each format compresses well, why converting JPEG to PNG never restores quality, how transparency survives conversion, and when WebP is actually worth it.

    Read more

    How Image Compression Actually Works (And Why Results Vary So Much)

    Lossy vs lossless compression explained, why the same quality setting shrinks one image by 80% and another by 5%, and how browser-based compression differs from server tools.

    Read more

    Aspect Ratio Cheat Sheet: Cropping for Web, Social and Print

    What 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 2:3 are actually for, how center-cropping decides what gets cut, and how to crop once for multiple placements without redoing the work.

    Read more

    Designing a Dark Mode Color System That Does Not Just Invert

    Why inverting a light palette produces a bad dark theme, how to build elevation without shadows, and the saturation and contrast adjustments dark surfaces require.

    Read more

    Colorblind-Friendly Palettes: Designing Beyond Contrast Ratio

    Why passing WCAG contrast is not enough for color vision deficiency, which hue pairs collapse for the most common types, and the redundant-encoding patterns that actually fix it.

    Read more

    Color Spaces for Web Work: sRGB, Display P3, and OKLCH

    What a color space actually defines, why the same HEX looks different across screens, when Display P3 is worth the trouble, and why OKLCH is replacing HSL for palette math.

    Read more

    From Brand Color to Design Tokens: Building a Usable Scale

    How to turn one or two brand colors into a token system that survives dark mode, accessibility checks and real product surfaces — naming, scale generation, and the semantic layer.

    Read more

    Transparency and Edge Quality: Why Cutouts Look Wrong on Dark Backgrounds

    How the alpha channel works, why premultiplied alpha causes dark or light fringing, and how to keep antialiased edges clean through cropping, resizing and format conversion.

    Read more

    Image SEO Checklist: Alt Text, Dimensions, and Everything Around the File

    The image markup and delivery decisions that affect search visibility and Core Web Vitals — alt text that works, width and height attributes, lazy loading, and responsive sources.

    Read more

    Favicons and App Icons: What You Actually Need in 2026

    The short list of icon files a modern site needs, why the 32-file favicon generators are obsolete, and how to design a mark that survives being rendered at 16 pixels.

    Read more

    EXIF Metadata and Privacy: What Your Photos Are Telling People

    What EXIF, IPTC and XMP actually store, how GPS coordinates end up in a screenshot of a screenshot, which platforms strip metadata, and when stripping it costs you something.

    Read more

    Link Exchange

    Coolors

    Generate and save color palettes

    Canva

    Graphic design tool

    Pexels

    Free stock photos and videos

    Unsplash

    Beautiful free images and photos

    Figma

    Design, prototype, and collaborate

    Looking to exchange links? Contact us for more information.