Skip to main content
benish
New Member
February 18, 2021

Change default display of color values to HSL?

  • February 18, 2021
  • 13 replies
  • 6676 views

When picking colors I’m always working in the HSL color system. When I want to change a color it makes so much more sense for me to be able to adjust the hue, saturation, or/and lightness rather than thinking about how edits to RGB might work, or trying to mentally decode hex values.

Often I’ll want a color of a similar saturation & brightness but a different hue. Or a color of the same hue & saturation but different brightness.

But in the Figma UI it defaults to showing hex values in the sidebar (or a color style name where the values are completely hidden unless I drill down):

Screenshot 2021-02-18 at 12.11.22@2x

Hex values can be useful for developers (although lately we’ve just been using HSL in our CSS), but is not very useful to me when designing except for the rare case when I’m copy/pasting a hex value from somewhere else. It’s certainly not the primary way I want to see / work with colors.

I’d love it if that display of HEX values in the UI was instead HSL. And secondarily, I’d love it if when a color style was selected there it showed the underlying HSL values right in the sidebar.

13 replies

Lotte Camilla
New Member
February 19, 2025
  1. would love to also see hsl with hex at once
  2. there’s an issue with hsl values changing when you copy the hex code to an object - why?
  3. too many clicks and bad UX in Figma for sure. Publish and Update - come on! It should be a panel for it with one click for each… Please fix it :)
Prateek Thapa
New Member
February 2, 2026

Bumping this post to add that Figma could move the color format component outside and make it readily accessible without having to go to a new popup?

A simple change like this would make it easy to swap between color formats, and you can still have the popup open when you click on the color swatch.

 

 

Milton David Alberto
New Member
July 8, 2026

Bumping this post to add that Figma could move the color format component outside and make it readily accessible without having to go to a new popup?

A simple change like this would make it easy to swap between color formats, and you can still have the popup open when you click on the color swatch.

 

 

Exactly!