First a word about colours on the web:
Colours on the web are no longer the big problem that once they were. Modern browsers and monitors render a far greater range of colours that just a few years ago.
Web designers have been drilled for years to stick to the 216 “web safe” colours but modern PCs and Macs are well able to cope with millions of colours.
So should we now stop worrying about it and let the imagination run wild?
Sorry - no, because just when you thought it was safe, along came WAP enabled phones and hand held devices that have some way to go before they can render many colours at all.
Then there is the question of accessibility, a braille or aural browser can tell the user the colour if it has an internationally recognised name. Guess which colours have such names - our old friends the “web safe” bunch, of course.
Having said this, all is not lost if you choose an “unsafe” colour scheme, but it must be remembered that if a browser cannot render a given colour it defaults to its nearest equivalent.
Monitor setting can really upset a carefully thought out design, but as these are beyond anyone’s but the users’ control there is little we can do other than to advise against using subtle changes of shade that will probably be lost on most monitors.
When choosing your scheme it is as well to bear in mind that dark text on light background is much easier to read that the other way around.
For those who do not know already, we web designers work with colours designated by a hexadecimal system with colours numbered from #000000 (black) to #FFFFFF (white). These equate to RGB numbers 0,0,0, to 255,255,255 respectively.
We offer two charts, one showing pantone colours, the other giving the “web safe” range.
Click here to view "web safe" colours
Click here to view pantone® colours
Feed Hex Numbers into this form and click "Show Me" to see a sample of the chosen scheme.
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