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Better color. Better starting points.

Welcome to Design News: a short edit of useful tools, practical methods, and ideas worth bringing into your next project. Our first issue starts with color in context and a few ways to get past the blank canvas.

01
New tools

A faster way to explore type tokens.

Penpot’s typography token tutorial shows how a reusable text style can carry font family, size, weight, line height, and letter spacing together. The small shift from one-off text styles to named tokens makes it easier to change a system without hunting through every screen.

Penpot / typography tutorial
03
Methods

Build color variations from one starting point.

CSS relative colors let you derive a new color from an existing one, adjusting channels instead of maintaining a separate hard-coded value for every variation. MDN explains the syntax and examples. Try a small set of related surfaces, then check support and contrast in your target browsers.

MDN Web Docs / reference