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When not to call a Blue a Blue — functional colour names for Design Systems

Goncalo Andrade
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readJul 4, 2019
Photo by Balázs Kétyi on Unsplash

As a contractor, I frequently work with different companies and teams which included some good designers. However, regardless of where each design team might be in terms of skill level, as soon as you start handling multiple designs, organising all the elements between them starts to get tricky.

This is where most people start thinking about organising a design system to follow, a part of which is the colour pallet. This is used to help ensure visual and semantic consistency throughout the project and facilitate both design and development (thank goodness for variables).

Most of the times I’ve seen this style guide take a shape like the one on the side here.

This might seem like the logical way of organising your pallets, but, as I’m about to argue, it comes with its own set of problems.

Why is this a problem?

“But Goncalo, surely it’s alright to name a blue colour ‘Blue’? What else would I call it?”

That is a fair point, so let’s see where that leads by doing a hypothetical project, as a thought experiment.

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Goncalo Andrade

UX Design Leadin London, I believe Design is all about coming together to solve human problems. I enjoy reading comic books and playing D&D

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