It’s important to remember that when displayed on a monitor, color is additive. This means that mixing multiple colors together will create white, explains Sarah Drasner in A Nerd’s Guide to Color on the Web.
Two different ways of expressing additive color are:
- RGB (Red, Green and Blue): Mixing the three can be used to create all colors. This is expressed in hexadecimal with one byte for each color: RRGGBB. For example, the hexadecimal for techPORTFOLIO red is #FF5145.
- HSL (Hue, Saturation and Lightness): Hue is on a 360° scale, saturation is the strength of a color, and lightness is proximity to white.
“A color is only a color in reference to another color,” says Drasner. Yellow text is easy to see against a black background, but not against a white one.