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How to name colors in a Design System

Definitive, Semantic, and Contextual naming conventions.

Kevin Muldoon
UX Collective
12 min readMar 24, 2022
Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton

Colors are the foundation of any Design System, but naming colors can be a struggle even for experienced Designers.

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Over six years ago, I created my first Design System and made a color palette to support a mobile survey app called QuickThoughts. I was using Sketch and loved how Zeplin automatically assigned ‘cool’ color names on import so I renamed all of my colors in a similar fashion.

Image of Definitively named color swatches used for QuickThoughts mobile application
The original color palette I created for a survey application, “QuickThoughts”

My choice of color names (‘Laughing Orange’, ‘Cardboard Tan’, ‘Shire Green’, etc) seemed reasonable at the time. However, this decision would soon prove to be a mistake when our organization bought another company that had a similar mobile application called ‘iPoll’.

After months of discussing how to include/support iPoll in our organization, the decision was made to deprecate the existing product and integrate its brand into…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Kevin Muldoon

Design Systems @ Dow Jones | Technologist, writer, speaker, and creator of genomecolor.space

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