About That #E32014 Hashtag

As a bit of a tech geek, I sometimes glean an intriguing fact from something mundane that almost no one would appreciate. This particular case should be no exception. If I were to tell this to someone walking by on the street, I’d probably be accused of talking absolute nonsense. That’s about how most of my puns are received, come to think of it.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen the hashtag #E32014 used over and over, and over. It’s no surprise, of course. Hashtags are a great way for people to sum up a thought into a simple subject – and I’m sure we have Twitter and its ultra-strict character limit to thank for its popularity.

There’s something peculiar about that particular E3 hashtag, isn’t there? It’s six characters… six hexidecimal characters. Had that E been a G, or greater letter, we would have been out-of-luck. “Out-of-luck”, you ask? We’re talking color codes!

Because #E32014 is a perfect six characters, and all of the characters exist in the strict hexidecimal format, where letters include A-F and numbers, 0-9, we can copy / paste that into a program like Photoshop and be returned a color. If you were a Web programmer, you could apply the same code to a background, a font color, and so forth. And why wouldn’t you? The result is a nice red:

And there you have it, folks. All the more reason to stop by Techgage regularly. Where else can you stumble-upon such important discoveries?