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System.Windows.Media.Color structure represents colors as 4 channels: alpha (opacity) channel and 3 channels for each core color (red, green and blue). aRGB color space is good for representing colors but it’s quite problematic to control such properties as brightness with these 4 channels. We will convert our colors to and from a HSB color space which is good at exactly what we need – controlling such perceptual color characteristics as hue, saturation and brightness.

Accessibility is important to consider when designing applications. Not only do those with visual, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities benefit from software that is accessible, but those without these disabilities benefit as well. Silverlight makes it possible to create applications that address accessibility needs, and some colleagues of mine and I decided to explore some of the possibilities by creating a control and navigation template theme that maps to Windows system colors (this will allow the application to seamlessly respond to Windows high contrast mode color changes).

If you’re a designer, you’re almost certainly interested in color. And if you’re interested in color, you could hardly do better than to pick up a copy of Shigenobu Kobayashi’s Color Image Scale. [...]

Kobayashi’s work is particularly awesome because he categorizes three-color combinations along a “soft-to-hard/warm-to-cool” axis and assigns zones of color that match how we respond to the combinations.

If you’re using existing imaging libraries with your Silverlight applications, they often represent a Color from the System.Drawing world in the full framework as an integer. An ARGB value is a 32-bit integer with the byte-ordering of AARRGGBB. Using some simple bit shifts and an extension method, you can have this functionality in Silverlight as well.

Although you can not animate between Brushes during different States, this tutorial demonstrates how to animate Colors to create a similar effect.

1. The problem

Download source code.

Have you ever wondered why the XAML parser recognizes the full palette of 141 colors (by name), but the Silverlight Colors class does not support the same full range of color names, for example, as WPF? I haven’t even noted that until the last week. In Silverlight in the XAML markup you can access all colors by name:

 Unfortunately, this not valid if you try the same operation in the code behind file:

If you check in MSDN you will see that the Colors class allows you to access only 16 colors.

In my recent TagCloud control series, I listed out a number of enhancements I wanted to implement. One of those enhancements was the ability to specify the tag item font color (as well as the mouseover/hover color as each tag is a hyperlink) as an initial parameter. When you consider deploying the control to more than one web site, the need for such customizations should be clear.

I’ve been using the site Colourlovers.com to get color inspirations. It’s a virtual color library where you can find thousands of color palettes, articles on color design, and follow color trends from magazine and websites.

What’s more useful about the site is that you can import the color palettes into Expression Design as swatches or add them into Expression Blend as application resources. Let me show you an example.