Erik D. Kennedy notes an interesting phenomenon of color gradients. If you have a gradient between two colors where the line between them in the color space goes through the zero-saturation middle, you get this “gray dead zone” in the middle.
It’s a real thing. See the gray middle here:
You can also see how colors might not do that, like red and blue here shooting right through purple instead, which you can visualize on that color circle above.
Erik says one solution can be taking a little detour instead of going straight through the gray zone:
His updated gradient tool deals with this by using different “interpolation modes” and easing the gradient with a choice of precision stops. Don’t miss the radial and conic options as well, with the ability to place the centers “offscreen” which can yield pretty cool looks you can’t do any other way.
Oh and speaking of conic gradients, Adam Argyle has a little gallery of possibilities that is pretty unique.
Now i understand why those gradient pallettes became popular suddenly. Thats fantastic thanks for sharing
Apparently web designers don’t ever go to art school, where they teach you things like adding complementary colors makes gray. There is even a mnemonic, “Red Cadillac BY General Motors.” The complementary color pairs are red/cyan, blue/yellow, and green/magenta.
That’s what I thought of when I saw this. Complements wash each other out.
You stick an analogus color in-between, no problem.
Apparently spreading useful knowledge about color to people who might not be familiar with it through means other than requiring spending exorbitant amounts of money on an education is frowned upon?
In the print world, I’ld say it’s a matter of color mode (gradients in cmyk work the same).
As is mentioned in 2018: https://codepen.io/szopos/pen/gKPqwq
The technical reason for this grey zone is because computations are done using a lossy sRGB algorithm, not because it should be grey (reference: https://webcolorisstillbroken.com/?ref=webdesignernews.com).
Thankfully this might be a thing of the past soon, with new color spaces coming to CSS: https://web.dev/state-of-css-2022/?via=emailweekly#gradient-color-spaces