Naming Color Variables in SASS - sass

Question

When creating a color scheme in SASS what's the conventional variable names for defining colors?
I know using color names are bad. Such as:
$blue
$red
$green
But I've not seen an alternative. I'm struggling for variable names for colors on the site that convey meaning.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found another idea in "SASS & Color Variables" article. The solution suggested by Sacha Greif is to use some variables to store descriptive color names, and some other to assign those colors to their functions:
// first we set descriptive variables:
$darkgrey: #333333;
$blue: #001eff;
// then we set functional variables:
$text_color: $darkgrey;
$link_color: $lightblue;
$border_color: $lightblue;
.myClass {
color: $text_color;
border-color: $border_color;
}
a {
color: $link_color;
}
I'm just beginning with SASS and don't know which approach is more practical, but I like the way it separates colors from their function.

Answer 2

In my personal experience the most useful way to name colors is to do it in regards of the color's function, such as
$background
$contrast
$text
$aside
$link
And so on. Of course which colors and name may depend on the design.
Then you may have different and exchangeable color schemes defined on different styles, such as:
_dark_scheme.scss
_light_scheme.scss
_pastels.scss
The idea here, is that you can use the same color variables in your main stylesheets, and do not depend on specific colors.

Answer 3

I like the idea of combining generic to specific naming (good for code completion) and description/functional naming. So you have something like this:
// Descriptive naming
$color-gray-light: #f3f3f3;
$color-gray-dark: #999999;
$color-red: red;
// Functional naming
$link-color: $color-red;
$link-border-color: $color-gray-light;

Answer 4

You can even create a mixin for greys (in the example RGBA is used for transparency, for example black on a red background would be more visible if it is 80% transparent black rather than dark grey).
#mixin grey($intensity: 0.5, $type: color) {
#{$type}: rgba(black, $intensity);
}
.i-am-50-percent-gray {
#include grey(0.5, color);
}
Give the result
.i-am-50-percent-gray {
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}