Design Nomenclature / Color
Gradient
Also called ramp, blend, graduated fill, degradé
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
A continuous interpolation between two or more colors across a region, evaluated per pixel. What it looks like depends entirely on the space it is interpolated in: the same two endpoints pass through a dead grey middle in sRGB, hold their chroma in Oklab, and sweep the long way round the wheel in a polar space.
In practice
A grey or muddy middle is the giveaway that a tool is interpolating in gamma-encoded sRGB, and it is the reason blue-to-yellow is the standard test. Banding is the other failure and a separate one — that is quantization, not interpolation, and more stops will not fix it.
Not to be confused with
- GradationChange applied by a rule across a sequence — size, value, spacing, or weight stepping in a consistent progression. Gradation gives direction: the eye runs down the ramp from large to small. Where repetition holds still and rhythm oscillates, gradation goes somewhere and arrives.
- BandingVisible steps in a gradient that should read as continuous, caused by too few code values across the range being covered — eight-bit encoding over a long shallow ramp is the usual culprit. Mach banding compounds it: the eye exaggerates edges, so each step acquires an illusory dark and light lip it does not have.