Hex codes of my life

Published by Nick at Aug 15, 2025 05:39 PM

This post is my entry for August’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Marisabel.

Fall is your reward for living in Upstate New York the rest of the year. It makes up for the lake effect snow in the winter, the pollen in the spring, and the humid, cloudy days in the summer. All the rain. If you’ve visited the Adirondacks, the Catskills, the Finger Lakes in early October to see the colors at their peak, you know what I’m talking about. Vivid reds, oranges and yellows. If you’ve never been, I invite you to check out Dan Mall’s 2023 Adirondacks fall photography It made me homesick and want to book a trip myself.

The color I most associate with the fall season upstate is the red of a maple leaf. Using the color tool Pika, I selected the value #C43F33 from a photo taken in Western New York. Pika uses an open source library of color names to display memorable names over a particular color, and calls this shade of red, “Red Poppy.”

I first encountered hex colors (hexadecimal coded colors) in the early 2000s when I was making my first web pages. There are many other ways to express color (RGB, CMYK, Pantone Matching System, HSL, HWB), but as a web designer of a certain age, the humble hex code is still my preferred way. I recall learning you could make certain six letter words in hex values, and so I snuck #C0FFEE and #BADA55 into my early designs. Today, I have still have certain codes memorized, and can visually approximate most colors by reading the six characters making up a hex code.

I moved with my family in 2003 to Arizona, and began attending Northern Arizona University as a freshman in August 2004. I quickly declared my major in Visual Communication, which my mom found in the course catalog first. The fall colors in Flagstaff are not quite the same as in upstate NY, but they have their own charm. My favorite places in Flagstaff include Walnut Canyon, Wupatki Monument, and Lockett Meadow. The highlight of Lockett is the gold aspen leaves in the fall, and you do feel like you’re in the most beautiful alpine forest in the world.

In 2010, I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee and started working for the U.S. Census Bureau, and other part-time temp jobs. I was looking for full-time design work, and freelancing a bit on the side. I finally landed on my feet at the University of Tennessee, where the bulk of my design work revolved around PMS 151, I mean #FF8200 for a decade. The color-names library does not define an exact match for this hex code sadly, but a close match in Pika is #ED8424, or “Orange Juice”.

Tennessee Volunteers “bleed orange”. The student body voted on orange as the primary school color in 1891. It is a bold color, and while there are other institutions using orange, the particular Tennessee Orange is quite distinct. Once in a while I’ll spot a Volunteers hat at an airport, and my heart skips a beat. My wife has a degree from the school of art, and while I only took one class there, my years of working for UT give me a particular affinity for the place and people.

I’m in my third year of living in Albuquerque now, and I didn’t have to ponder long about the color I most associate with this place. It is the bright blue of a clear sky. We have a lot of sunny days here in New Mexico, and this shade of blue (#6D97E6 or “Cerulean”) is one I never get tired of.

I could go on and on about hex codes, but I thought I’d make this entry personal to places I’ve lived. Although I’ve moved a bit in my lifetime, each of these locales holds a special place in my heart. I don’t think of “home” as a singular place. I’m a visual person and color memories are very evocative of my homes.

• Personal