Once at a job when I was supposed to make a website work (and I’ll stress, I am not a graphic designer and wasn’t hired as one!) I made the layout as nice as I could, but I insisted on only using named CSS colors because I just do. not. care. about color theory. By which I mean, I don’t want to waste time and do a crappy job at it when someone else could do it much better and properly and faster. So the named colors are meant as an obvious placeholder for a more creative person to replace with something real later.

When my boss gave me feedback he just said that it’s ugly. I started saying “yeah, the colors are placeholders, we can change that easily. I’ll fiddle it with it I’ll stick with named colors” (above explanation was to follow).

Before I even got to the named colors bit, he interrupted me and said “don’t use named colors ever”.

I guess maybe I was hired as a graphic designer? News to me!

(I’m making him sound awful but he was actually a really good boss. This interaction is not representative of our usual dynamics. I’m not employed by him anymore but we are on good terms.)