We all know that color is an essential part of our website design and needs to be carefully selected, especially if the site is used in business or for professional reasons.
We have all created web pages and graphic where we think the colors are awsome, but when seen on different computers the colors changed.. What happened, and why did it happen?.Well, the problem is that different platforms use different kinds of color palettes. To make this clearer lets compare Macs and PCs, both computers have 256 colors, but only 216 of those are the same colors. The other 40 some colors were used for applications relevant to the operating system. Although the above situation may not be as relevant today, as it was 10 years ago. We still need to be aware that the problem exists and that many people are still working on these old computers.
The web safe color palette was invented when displays were only capable of using 256 colors. Today computers are able to display millions of colors, because of the need for gamers to have better gaming quality. So, to some extent using the 216 color rule may not be relevant any more, but it is still safer to use the 216 colors that are shared by all computer platforms.
Ok so let’s say you use an image editor like photoshop on a Mac to design your website and you use several colors. How do you choose colors that the major browsers like Netscape and Internet Explore will see as the same colors you chose? Well, you can’t just randomly choose your favorite colors. You need to choose colors that are withing the 216 shared colors.
Choose Colors that are within the 216 Web Color Range
You need to know the numbers of those 216 colors are 00 336699CCFF although they are all found on the RGB pallete values of your web design, or image editing program.
The 216 web colors are in different forms of 00 33 66 99 CC FF. The numbers in the 216 color range are called Hexadecimal colors and generally it is very difficult to see the number on the system palette. To avoid that you can make sure your image editor is set to use RGB value on your system pallet. When choosing your colors in programs like Photo Shop or Illustrator, it will ask you what color pallet you want to use. RGB defines its colors based on the red, green, and blue value, and then converts them to Hexadecimal values.
When using color in your web design just be sure to use the 216 shared colors and you can do that by using RGB values. That way you will know that your colors will always be true and no one will ever have a problem viewing them, no matter what platform or computer they are using.
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