Cross-disipline

Color Theory and Design Systems - Building Flexible Style Strategies

Insights on color theming in design systems will be shared. Challenges in accessibility contrasts and color token thinking will be discussed.

Samuel Mork Bednarz

Samuel Mork Bednarz

I'm a Senior Frontend Engineer at Olavstoppen, currently contracted to Equinor. Prior to that, I contributed to IndyRIOT, helping create a Slack-style communication platform. In parallel with client work I contribute activley to open source. I’m the creator of Moonbow, a library for applying GLSL shaders to HTML images, and UmbraJS, a toolkit for highly dynamic theming. My work on a WebGPU related open source project was recently highlighted in WebGPU Experts - The Best of WebGPU in April 2024.

I also hold a Bachelor's degree in Graphics Design from Teesside University.

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Over the past 3 years I have been obsessivley digging through design systems and their approach to color theming. This comes as a result of me wanting to build a JS library for automatically generating color themes from very minimal inputs (UmbraJS). In this talk I would like to share the insights that I have gained in doing so - explaining how I approach thinking about color tokens, what challenges still exist with calculating accesibility contrasts in colors and why I think color is the most foundational part of any design system.