The Problem with Traditional Color Systems
For years, designers have relied on HSL and hex codes to communicate colour. They're familiar, well-supported, and every tool understands them. But they have a fundamental flaw: they're not perceptually uniform.
When you increase the lightness of a blue by 20%, and then increase the lightness of a yellow by the same 20%, the visual change looks very different. Your brain perceives the yellow change as much larger. This creates inconsistent, unpredictable colour scales.
Enter oklch
oklch stands for OK Lightness, Chroma, Hue. The "OK" part refers to the Oklab colour space, developed by Björn Ottosson in 2020. It's designed so that equal numerical changes produce equal perceived changes.
When we build a design system, we define a scale from 50 to 950 for each colour. With oklch, every step looks visually even. Dark mode stops being a guessing game.
We've applied this to every Studio Nova project since late 2023 and the results have been consistent: fewer revision cycles, more coherent designs, and happier engineers who don't have to eyeball dark mode adjustments.