Material Design 3 HTC Color Space Deep Dive

Design wise changes from Material Design 2 color palette to Material Design 3 HTC color space leaves enough gaps that Designers need to ask some specific color questions to see where they can awesome twist the design rules.

Let me show you know by stepping you through how the HTC color space is used in Material Design 3.

Design Thinking

Here is a trick to it:

1. Find out what are the hard rules that one should adhere to and not change.

2. Find out which rules are soft-rules that can be either modified or broken.

Now, there is more to it than that; but those are the 2 major truths of design.

Let me show you how to think about color spaces, specifically Hue-Tone-Chroma, it’s known as HSV in the computer graphics world.

HTC(HSV)

Now, I will not cover the math in this article. But basically the Material Design 2 ARGB color space does not take vision perception into consideration and is usually represented this way: