Sass 3 Color Manipulation
I was going to write about the Compass Colors plugin merging into Sass 3, but it looks like Sass-maintainer Nathan Weizenbaum has already written a great article about it.
Read about Powerful Color Manipulation with Sass on his blog.
Just for kicks, here is a relavant portion of Sass colors that I use on this blog:
$font-color: darken(#4e4c49, 5)
$darker-font-color: #4e4c49
$header-color: darken($font-color, 10)
$border-color: #d0d0d0
$link-color: #af512c
#social
color: lighten($font-color, 40)
#footer
background: darken(#603d17, 5)
These functions are also used in Brandon Mathis' fantastic Fancy Button library. Brandon and Susy's Eric Meyer are both Compass core contributors now. Congratulations to both and thanks for all the fantastic code.