Design Nomenclature / Color
Shade
- Color
- Physical Model Making
- 2D & 3D
A hue with black added — darker and lower in chroma than the parent. Black is a blunt instrument: it kills chroma quickly and drags most hues toward a muddy olive, which is why painters darken with a complement or a dark analogous hue and reach for black last.
In practice
Used casually for any darker variant. Web tooling makes it worse: a component's 'shades' usually means the whole light-to-dark ramp, tints included.
Not to be confused with
- TintA hue with white added — lighter and, in pigment, lower in chroma than the parent. Tinting raises value while pulling toward the achromatic axis, which is why pastels read as soft rather than merely pale: the white dilutes the colorant as it lifts it.
- ToneA hue with grey added — chroma reduced without a committed move in value. Toning is how a palette is made to sit together: most color that reads as considered has been toned, because a shared grey pulls otherwise unrelated hues onto common ground and lets the saturated accent carry the emphasis.