The use of hex codes in skeuomorphic representations reminds me of a small detail in branding that I learned a few years ago from a friend.
Because of how the same hex code will translate into different colors on different devices/screens, brands will often define print and digital palettes separately, and their print palettes might also change slightly based on the medium, like on card stock vs. cardboard. Turns out just picking the "same" color across multiple mediums is non-trivial.
It's really hard to get the same perceived color out of a screen (which shines combinations of R, G, and B at your eyes) versus a physical thing (which reflects a subset of the sun's radiation into your eyes).
The way we do this only works for humans, incidentally. Most of the time, different things only appear to have the same color because they happen to map to the same "point" in color perception space, not because they actually produce the same light distribution.
Eh, it’s a nightmare even on entirely digital platforms. The photographer insists on using prophoto RGB. The client tweaks the images in photoshop, and saves them in Adobe RGB. They then upload them all, which converts them to sRGB, which looks fine to them and us on our calibrated monitors. An hour later, their MD calls, furious that on his computer, this blue dress looks green, that beige bag looks grey.
Colour is wildly inconsistent across software and hardware. It’s amazing to me that nothing has really changed or got better in decades. If anything, it’s getting worse, with the various HDR standards.
I think people tend not to see it as a big thing (or even not notice it at all) because colour being wildly inconsistent is the normal case in the real world, due to changing lighting conditions, and our brains adjust for it automatically.
Because of how the same hex code will translate into different colors on different devices/screens, brands will often define print and digital palettes separately, and their print palettes might also change slightly based on the medium, like on card stock vs. cardboard. Turns out just picking the "same" color across multiple mediums is non-trivial.