Hex Color Examples

part of our series “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Hex Colors”

If you’re just starting out with hex colors, you may want a chance to try out some of this yourself. Here’s a list of some basic hex color codes. See if you can identify what color each one will make, and then scroll down when you’re ready to see the answers.

BASICS

• #00FF00
• #8000FF

EXTREMES

• #FFFFFF
• #000000

SHADES

• #FFCCCC
• #500000

Once you’ve written down your guesses, scroll down for some answers.

Basic solutions

All green and no other colors pretty obviously makes for a bright, bright green.

The purple is a bit harder — you may not have known that FF red and FF blue mix to make a color called magenta. If you want to get a true purple like this one, you have to tone down the red a bit.

Extreme solutions

These ones are extreme, not because they’re hard to understand, but because they use ALL and NONE of the light respectively.

These two are fascinating. When you mix ALL the colors of light together, you get white. Mixing colors of lights works the opposite way that mixing paints does, because mixing paints is subtractive; paint pigments ABSORB light. The more pigments you mix, the more light it will absorb, and the darker the paint appears.

Mixing colored light to get white light isn’t new — you’ve probably done this with prisms in science class at some point.

If you can split white light to get a rainbow of colors (and you can see that red, green, and blue are the most visible shades of that light), then it makes sense that you could reverse this process and mix red, green, and blue back together to get white light.

The last one should seem obvious now. #000000 doesn’t include any of the colors, and often confuses first-time designers. But ask yourself, what’s it called when there’s no light?

Darkness.

That’s right; this is the hex code for black.

Shady Solutions

Now that you’re comfortable with darkness and light, double check your last two before you look at the answers.

This pinkish shade comes from starting with as much red as possible, and then lightening it even further adding equal parts of the other two types of light. Now that you know that #FFFFFF makes white, it makes sense that #FFCCCC would be a color that’s closer to white than it is to red.

The last one is a spin on that same idea.

Start with some red, and then dim it to get this darker shade.

Try It Yourself

There’s a phenomenal game that lets you try your hand at decoding or even just guessing hex colors called What The Hex, and it’s incredibly fun. Try it out.