I’ve been working in photoshop and on the web for years, and I’ll hold my hand up in admitting that I never really knew how hex colour codes worked. If you don’t work on the web then you maybe wondering that hex colours are? Well when you are looking at the source for pages around the Web, you may see cryptic six-digit codes in place of colour names, that’s hex codes!
These are actually numbers written in base 16, or hexadecimal. Without going too far into the maths (because I *really* hate maths), there are a few things to know:
Counting in base 16 goes like this: 0123456789ABCDEF. W.T.F??
Well, “9” means nine, “A” means ten, “B” means eleven, and so forth. So F is the highest digit you can use in hexadecimal, and it’s worth fifteen.
Colours represented in hexadecimal are numbers with six digits. The first two are for red, the next two are for green, the last two are for blue. Shorthand: RRGGBB.
The higher the number, the brighter the pixel on the screen. So 0 is the lowest setting (black) and F is the brightest setting.
Thus, the higher the number in the “GG” position, the higher the green on your screen gets turned up. So #00FF00 means “green,” since the two red digits and two blue digits are 0 but the two green digits are at their highest setting!
So I guess that means that roses are FF0000, and violets are 0000FF! ;)
For the really nerdy check out http://sassme.arc90.com/ a real time visualization of SAAS colour manipulation!
Wow, that’s cool and pretty handy too as I’m a big fan of using SCSS in my projects! Thanks for sharing.