Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at color tips and tricks in Figma... loads of shortcuts, a little bit of informational knowledge about color... like Dynamic Color... and in the end we devolve into color lore... funny color memes from the internet I think they're funny, anyway... where somebody decided to name all the colors, all right, let's jump in.

The first one, easy one, is using the I key... to get to the Eyedropper to steal colors... so I for Eyeball, you get it... but the only warning with this one is, this one over here, if I click this... this is a style for my primary color... if I want to steal it using the Eyedropper tool, 'I' for Eyeball...

and I click on it... it actually brings through the Hexadecimal number, not the actual style... which is a, I don't know, feels like a bug... there's a lot of people complaining about this... hopefully it'll be updated when you do it... but at the moment it doesn't take the style...

just the Hex number, so you got to be careful. You can use it and update it in a big sweeping update color styles... which we'll do in a, in a video or two... just to make sure they are using the styles... there you go, that's the Eyedropper tool, I for eyeball. The next tip is with something like this...

if I hit my number keys... it will jump through opacity, you probably already know that... so just the numbers on your keyboard, 3 for 30, 9 for 90... 0 turns out to be 100% opacity... and to get to 0% opacity just hit '0' twice... sets to 0, 0 once is 100%, double 0, 0%, confusing, Dan, 2...

0, you get the idea. A reminder that you can actually nudge color in here... so I've got it open, I can use my up and down arrows... can you see, it goes down across the colors, hold 'Shift' to speed it up... there you go, up and down... I don't find that particularly useful, but the scroll wheel on the mouse is...

see my scroll wheel here, you might be using a touch pad or something else... but I can rub my scroll wheel up and down... and we can change the hue... if you hold down the Option key whilst doing the same thing... it changes the opacity... I don't use that at all, but there you go...

these are color tips and tricks, you might need it. One of the things that I use a lot, Hex is not very good... I use it for copying and pasting from programs, but I find HSB... so RGB, I don't really understand, I know it's Red, Green, Blue... but I can't really type in the color I want... CSS colors, if you are a developer you can copy and paste, from code...

if you're using RGB, and A for Alpha, that's how transparent it is... you might be copying and pasting, you can so switch to CSS, just dump it in there... same, I don't use HSL, I use HSB... so Hue, Saturation, Luminance; Hue, Saturation, Brightness... basically, the same thing... like this because I can play with the hue, maybe don't play with a Hue slider...

but let's say that I get to a color that I like... but I know that's the saturation, I can hold 'Shift' and hit down... and it just kind of lowers it down, I find it's useful for picking colors... when I'm trying to pick maybe a color to complement the one I've got... and the brightness, you'll see it there, it kind of moves straight across... and this one here, if I up and down, I find those handy...

so scroll wheel, left and right, to when I'm rubbing my mouse wheel... and this one here to go up, down... to get the saturation up and down, and then tab across... hold 'Shift', up and down to get lightness and darkness. Another interesting factoid about color is that... you can programmatically, now in code...

get what's called a Dynamic Color, let me show you that real quick. So I'll leave a link to this in the Exercise Files... but it's just good documentation of what dynamic color is... the short version is, is that when you are loading content... into say an app or a website, you can, in code, go and say... "Hey, look at the image, find me a color from it"...

like a general color, most used color, and set that as the color theme... so let's say that's our album cover that gets loaded into our music app... and instead of being this, this might be your default colors... it actually goes and checks the image and readjusts its color based on it... you'll see it loads when, let's say this bottom bar here... will be pulling colors from this...

you can't do it in Figma, you can't like magically do it... you could just use the Color Picker to mimic it... you just need to work with your developer to make sure that... it's something that happens, you know, it's something that you've identified... and you want this to be dynamic... require some documentation and speaking with the developer...

it's not hard to implement ... it might mean that your color scheme is not perfect... but, I don't know, it can be quite sympathetic and give the illusion of... lots of stuff going on, and lots of design choices, when really... it's just kind of pulling colors from the image. The last one is naming colors with words...

this isn't essential, this is more fun... if you think design color nerdy, history, stuff is fun... I think it's hilarious, like you can type in the word "red" if you want red... is that handy? Kind of, is interesting to know... the fun part is that somebody at some stage decided to name all the colors...

there's millions of colors, they're not all named... but it's part of the kind of UI design folklore... so like this one here I love, somebody decided this is Blanched Almond... there's some really weird kind of color naming in here... and I guess I share it with you because it is... one of the fun kind of design memes and you should know them...

don't find it funny, that's all right, skip ahead... but if you're a color nerd it's interesting to see what... like you can spell gray with an "a"... or gray with an "e", same, same. This one here though, like let's type in "dark gray"... dark gray is lighter than regular gray, oh man, it's weird...

need a pink, there you go, it's a pink, need more pink, what about hot pink... that didn't work, no spaces, hot pink, there we go... deep pink... there is Fuchsia, I can't spell Fuchsia so I'm not going to type that one... another one of my favorites is Aqua... and it's very different...

Cyan, exactly the same color... and probably most famous of the colors, is not peach, peach is useful... is this one here, Peach Puff... one of the best named colors of all time... so the next time you're at a design conference... and somebody starts referencing Peach Puff...

or the X11 color naming system... and dark gray is lighter than regular gray, you're in on the joke... all right, that is it, color tips and tricks over.