Colors

Using color is a great way to spruce up a web site. and when surfing the web you will find many sites that make very effective use of color. Here are a few things you should know.

216 "Web Safe" Colors

Different platforms use different color palettes. This fact causes great difficulties in creating web pages with graphics that look the same (or even close sometimes) from one machine to another. 

One way to be absolutely sure that the colors from one platform and browser to another are identical is to always use the 216 web safe color palette. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape use the same palette management process to pull colors from the system palettes. What this means is that the browsers will ensure that if you use this system the colors will remain the same.

Most graphics editors will allow you to specify a web safe palette. Here is an example of the palette "safety.pal" from Paint Shop Pro. If you edit a graphic using this palette you will ensure that you are using colors that will work on all platforms.

Every graphic includes a palette, or list of colors which may be used. This palette informs the system which colors are contained within a graphic image.

Other graphics editors such as Photoshop have equivalent ways to specify a color safe palette.

 

The above palette is from Microsoft Frontpage 2000. It contains the 216 web-safe colors.  You can use this when creating colors for text and other elements on a page.

Using Other Palettes

The 216 web safe palette is great for web pages and simple drawings, but it's not so hot for photographs and more complex graphics. In that case, I would tend to just use whatever palette I wanted and let the platform and browser decide how to display the colors.

The way I look at it, getting exactly identical colors going from PC to Mac to WebTV to AOL and from Mosaic to Internet Explorer to Netscape to Opera is just not practical. You can do it (at least I think you could) but personally, I would rather spend the time on designing the web site, not worrying about exact colors.