The official book of California Stylesheets
(and that's okay)
It's a book about writing CSS.
And not writing CSS.
The official book of California Stylesheets
(and that's okay)
It's a book about writing CSS.
And not writing CSS.
Every second spent in a hex color picker is lost forever. It is over 99% design fussing, in service to nobody but the fussing designer.
The color dropper tool with a quick copy/paste is a little bit better. Really though, we should be starting our color process with names, not values.
Colors are flexible concepts. “Cyan” is a light blueish color.
Cyan makes a great palette color. It doesn’t make a great brand color. Your brand color should be a very specific hex value that has been fussed over by a designer. It’s the color you’d go to court over. Or some faceless corporation would go to court with you over, because they trademarked the feelings that color evoked, or that specific wavelength of light, or whatever they’re up to these days.
That court color is called the base color in CASS.
CASS comes with hundreds of colors right out of the box. The number is so high because you can combine words in CSS classes to describe colors, like “very dark blue.”
The adjectives: Bright, light, dark and dim. So you don’t use “green” and “forestgreen,” you use “green” and “dark green.”
On top of that, California Stylesheets supports two adverbs: very and hella. Dark red will be dark, but not as dark as very dark red, which isn’t as dark as hella dark red.
[For anyone not in the know, hella is a Californian slang shortening of “hell of a” and it works like saying “very very”]
Picking colors in this way, with descriptive words instead of a hex color picker, saves tons and tons of time. The colors are right there and self-describing. They don’t need any accompanying hex information. It’s a matter of picking “very dim cyan” over #335c5c.
The Gumroad version contains a secret chapter that spills the dirt on CSS preprocessors, a tech CASS no longer uses.
