Spent 4 hours trying to match a gradient from a dribbble shot

I found this sick poster design on dribbble last night with this smooth orange to deep red gradient that just worked. Tried recreating it in Figma for like 2 hours by eyeballing the color stops and it looked nothing like it. Finally grabbed a color picker tool and sampled 6 different points along the gradient to get the hex values. Took another 2 hours of fiddling with blend modes before I realized they used a gradient map overlay. Has anyone else burned a whole afternoon on something this dumb?

2 comments

2 Comments

leebrown2d agoTop Commenter

120% man, I used to think I could just eyeball gradients and get it close enough. Then I spent a whole Sunday trying to match a purple and teal gradient from a photo and ended up learning about color spaces instead. Now I just grab the hex values first thing and save myself the headache.

the_sage2d ago

Gradients are more about how colors interact with each other than their exact hex values though. If you just sample a few points and copy them, you lose the relationship between those colors. Eyeing it forces you to actually see the transitions, the way light moves through the blend. Took me way too long to figure out that two gradients with identical hex stops can look completely different depending on the curve and color space you choose.