Color in CSS: using new spaces, functions, and techniques to make your site shine

Session Category Theming, Design, & Usability Room Auditorium Audience All Attendees Time Slot Sat 1:00pm to 1:45pm (2/24/24)

When working with color on the web, we’ve always had a few choices: HEX, RGB, and HSL. In recent years, however, the color level 4 specification introduced a few newcomers: HWB, LCH, okLCH, LAB, and okLAB. What are these new color options, and what do they add to variety of color choices we already have? Let’s get nerdy about colors and the options we have today.

In this talk, I will discuss 

  • What’s new in the CSS Color Module Levels 4 and 5
  • An overview of color spaces available today
  • How to use some of the new CSS color functions 
  • Using CSS custom properties to change the values of color items within each color space
  • Ways to ensure the colors you use on your site are accessible by using prefers-contrast, light-dark, and other modern techniques

Attendees will come away from this session with a deeper knowledge of the new color spaces and CSS color functions to make adding color to your site even easier!

Youtube Video
Slides PDF format: Color in CSS.pdf (676.42 KB)

About the Speaker

Aubrey Sambor

Lead Engineer at Lullabot

Northampton, MA

Aubrey Sambor is a Lead Engineer who loves creating accessible websites using clean and modern CSS. She initially learned to code in the late 90s when her high school friends told her about this cool website called Geocities. She decided she wanted a site of her own, so she bought an HTML 4 book and taught herself the ways of code. 

Aubrey graduated from Indiana University with a Bachelors degree in computer science and started her career building custom PHP web portals for clients, eventually discovering Drupal in 2008. She is passionate about design systems, accessibility, and the latest and greatest CSS techniques.

In her spare time, Aubrey loves to knit, spin her own yarn on one of her two spinning wheels, and walk on the many trails and paths throughout western Massachusetts. She's left-handed and has always disliked it when her classmates took all the left-handed scissors in art class.