What does a traditional craft have in common with digital design and web development? How does technology shape technique and creative process? That’s what I asked myself when watching two totally different versions of the same image idea, woven by the same artist, Lise Gujer, at Brücke Museum Berlin, and when visiting innovative textile design presentations at Weissensee art high school in Berlin. Although weaving, textile and web design don’t share exatly the same kind of constraints, but they all apply limited palettes of colors into a rectangular base to create colorful images. That’s why it felt familiar for me as a web developer.
Web Colors and their Meanings
Web colors are “Webfarben” in German, which can mean web colors or weaving colors, although the latter is less common. Green grass gives hope for a good harvest, blood runs red, and red traffic lights mean stop almost everywhere. Ripe red berries catch our eye, but they can be tasty or toxic. Colors are no universal symbols. Their meanings depend on culture and context. Don’t ask what colors mean, better ask what they mean to you and your audience!
Material and Virtual Color Constraints
Colors are material in weaving and textile design. Supply bottlenecks and ecological concerns might limit textile designers in their choice of colors. Contrarily, websites are literally made out of light and ideas. Brand colors and color contrast accessibility are constraints limiting our digital web color palette these days. Technical limitations and incompatibilities restricted web developers to a web-safe color palette Its most basic colors were given vivid names like fuchsia and aqua, while later sets included poetical names like lemonchiffon, peachpuff or cornflowerblue.
Constraints can benefit creativity though.
Color Innovators of Different Kinds
In the material world, innovators like Birke Weber invented new organic fungi-based dying options. Jasmin Sermonet modified machines used for weaving, effectively hacking textile tools. A project called Urban Fibers collected textile waste from the streets of Berlin to turn it into recycled yarn. All three projects were shown at the 2024 Weissensee art high school graduation presentation.
More or Less Web Colors
It took me some time to write an article about all of that inspiration. Currently, I’m looking forward to another color innovation, urgently awaited in 2026 in my field of expertise, web development and design. In recent years, CSS (style sheets) specs were updated to enable using even more colors than the 16.7 million that we already had before. At the same time, extended color possibilities were reduced in practice due to strict color contrast requirements of accessibility legislation. Not every web designer and developer was happy about this situation.
Color Contrast Lacking Perceptual Uniformity
However, those regulations enforced outdated mathematical models that don’t accurately model human perception. The existing tools weigh color contrast balanced within the red, green and blue RGB color space. They were lacking perceptual uniformity according to what most people actually see.
Accessibly Color Contrast Algogrithm Update
The upcoming Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) models human vision more accurately. It aims to fix the current algorithm so that contrast feels correct to the eye, sparing us from arguing with customers over standards that we don’t wholeheartedly support anyway. The Berlin-based data visualization expert Lisa Charlotte Muth has already written an excellent article about the technical details and implications of APCA and WCAG 3.0 color contrast in practice. Tailwind design engineer Dan Hollick also wrote about WCAG 3 and APCA. Last, but not least, CSS café online meetup host and fellow freelance web developer, Christian Schäfer (Schepp), once again pointed my nose in the right direction of an important innovation.
APCA, the Alpaca Acronym
Sparing you more cryptic acronyms, let me show you an animal called alpaca. When you hear “APCA” again, just think of the cute furry animal, and you will never forget the correct order of the letters. APCA even sounds a little bit like Alpaca. Just remember that it’s not the official pronunciation (yet).
Ageless Color Design Principles
There are basic design principles that aged well, like balancing a color palette of three colors painting about 60% of its space with the primary color, the next 30 by the secondary, and only 10% designed with an accent color. Color psychology clichés work in many situations, using red for alerts and urgent calls to action, blue to suggest serious calm and money etc.
With a sufficient number of users, we can leverage A/B testing to verify our assumptions and design ideas with measurable numbers.
Trends and brand colors are usually beyond our control, but color contrast is mandated by law, as we saw. Nevertheless we are still legally allowed to rely on color alone to convey meaning. Of course we shouldn’t.
Which Web Colors are most accessible?
There is only one two-color-combination safely considered the most accessible color combination. And they are not even “real colors” but the most extreme shades of gray: black and white. Why? Because not everyone perceives the visual world in the same way. Some divergent perceptions even have names like dichromatic color vision, also known as red-and-green-blindness.
Even the same person couldn’t experience brand colors looking exactly the same on every device and monitor, lighting or when wearing different glasses. Technically, we should think of color as a bonus, not as a foundation.
Make it Right in Black and White
I wrote about page layout before. Apart from brand identity and accessibility concerns, the freedom of web designers is often also limited by advertising and other unaesthetic requirements. However, colors, shapes and text together can carry enough redundancy to make a website transport its message and functionality inclusively to everyone. No matter how they see colors or if they can see at all. Accessibility defines useful constraints. Creative design develops appealing interactive solutions within these constraints. Digital creation has much more in common with traditional craftsmanship than you might know at first sight.
Further Parallels and Differences
The parallels become obvious when woven works reveal their structure, abstracting rounded forms into an angular grid. Lise Gujer’s working methods with her clients and her artistic collaborator Kirchner reminded me of my own daily life as a web developer: developing ideas, refining them, and implementing them within the realm of technical possibility. Kirchner often provided only very rough sketches, supplemented by colored threads or markings. Gujer brought the sketches to life. Consequently, Kirchner called her weaving “a new way of painting.”
Weaving Dye and Web Colors: Material vs. Application
Web colors, weaving threads and web design have parallels. As for weaving dyes, I unfortunately can’t reveal any sources for beautiful threads. However, I am familiar with web colors. In both cases, it’s not just the material that matters, but also the application. When Lise Gujer wove one of her first works in a new version decades later, she chose more intense colors, inspired by her trip to Peru and closer to Kirchner’s expressionist painting palette. Moreover, she now knew how to prevent the pale warp threads from dimming the image.
The newer version isn’t exactly recent anymore. Still, from my perspective, it reminds me of illuminated digital art. Surely, it doesn’t lack sufficient color contrast at all.
Real-Life Crafts and Colors
Real-life encounters are becoming more valued again as a counter-culture movement in times of accelerated automation and low-quality artificial intelligence assistance. I attended several conferences and meetups like Beyond Tellerrand recently. Events and exhibitions like the one at Brücke Museum in Berlin add haptic sensation, scent and action to an otherwise mainly visual experience.
In front of the museum wall tapestries, we can see a wooden floor loom. It may be the same or a similar one that the artist used to produce her colorful images. The museum did a good job showcasing contemporary tools and providing a participative space. Visitors could give weaving a try to understand its concepts.
Wefts and warp threads might have been basic professional concepts that the customers had never heard of before and probably didn’t care about then. Just as contemporary customers only want things to work and look good, when it comes to web colors in web design.
Constraints are beautiful
In the end, it doesn’t matter much mostly, whether we work with 16 or 16 million colors. Applied art, craft, and elegantly sustainable web design, after all, imply creating something exciting in the scope of limited constraints.
