Our design system leverages mix blend modes for hover states so our icon buttons appear on any background color and remain accessible, without needing separate hover–on-primary, hover–on-secondary, etc tokens. We use multiply for light theme, and screen for dark theme. It would be really awesome if we could apply blend modes directly to the color variables, OR support blend modes as variables in general.
Our current work around is to apply the blend mode directly on each component variant, but this requires us to define separate light and dark theme variants. would be great if we could use variables here to have it automatically switch between light/dark.
Our team needs this as well! We are using “multiply” for our hover states to gain accessibility no matter what color the button background is, but need to turn this off in dark mode.
When you set a color to use a variable the color picker UI hides the blend mode button, however the blend modes still work. You should be able to see what blend mode a color is set to even if it’s controlled by a variable.
Just have run in to an issue where I am needing to use a simple raster image on different color modes like dark and light, and need the image to be able to switch blending modes to go from being a mostly dark image to inverted light one.
The way to get around this currently is by using bools to toggle between multiple copies of the raster image’s visibility when each is set to different color blend modes like “Normal” and “Difference” for example…
It would also be nice to just be able to not only control layer visibility but individual properties like FILL and STROKE visibility as well (stroke is less important since a value of zero can be used to effectively also “hide” a stroke’s visibility via mode controls)
Hi @JDPoZ, Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on variable. Your detailed description of your use case and workaround is incredibly helpful.
It sounds like both of your ideas could be really beneficial for other members of our community. We’re excited to see how they’ll respond to your suggestions.
If anyone in our community supports this idea, please show your enthusiasm by casting your vote!
Thanks again for taking the time to share your ideas with us.
@dvaliao This topic “Support for blend modes with variables” was created a half a year ago, but nothing has been changed. It’s a bug, because when you create a color with a blend mode, then define it as a variable, this variable loses the blend mode. At that moment you have two different values of this variable. First one, a frame with color from which you put it in Variables. Second one, all new frames with the same name of the color, but with different value, because it had lost the blend mode
I actually noticed that the built-in iOS components seem to have different blend modes in their light mode vs dark mode. No idea how this is accomplished unless they just have access to features that normal folks do not.
For example if you place the Sheet - iPhone component and have it’s variable mode set to light and then break the instance, you’ll see the top fill color uses a Color Dodge blend mode, but if you set it to dark mode, the top fill color is set to Overlay. Although neither are actually using variables when broken. Very odd, but would love to be able to do this as well.
Figma could allow us(me) to input the CSS code into the color picker modal when creating the variable. Also, being able to use variable in that would be helpful. Right now the behavior is to overwrite the input with an rgba value.
eg. my input would be: color-mix(in srgb, var(–core-color1) 92.857%, var(–core-color2))
Also, also, it is important to use the colormix function for color instead of gradient. one cannot use gradients for text in the wild and Dev is left to interpret or I give them a hex which defeats the purpose.
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