Want to drive a graphic designer crazy? Tell them you want something a primary color and then complain that it isn’t the exact shade you had in mind. Stand back and watch their head explode. Every time. Even the most patient designer eventually grows tired of the thousands of shade variations to any given color.

Blue seems to be especially difficult. Everyone has some sense in their mind of what blue is. My coffee cup is blue. The handle on the scissors is blue. The cover of the book next to me is blue. Yet, none of them are the same color. Get into the intimate nuances of graphic design and simple differences of opinion become horribly complicated and difficult. Making things all the more challenging is the fact that hardly anyone actually color calibrates their computer monitor, which means anything viewed online is going to look different on every computer by just a little, and sometimes that “just a little” is too much.

Fortunately, for our purposes, it is perfectly acceptable to combine and interchange shades of blue. We can take our background from teal to indigo and change the entire tone of the image with a simple nudge of a color slider. Could they all be exactly the same? Sure, we could have taken that route, but where would be the fun in everything looking the same, especially when our model, Tiffany Beckett, came all the way in from Utah to give us such a diverse set of expressions? Such wide-ranging emotion deserves backgrounds that are as equally malleable.

Of course, all those variations give graphic designers headaches as well. They would much prefer we stick with one specific shade and run with it. All this moving around and adjusting things is distracting and takes away from the cohesion of the project.

Damn good thing I’m not a graphic designer, isn’t it?