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I have always struggled with what color palette
to use when working for the web. Should I use the 216 color
web-safe palette? Or should I just use the colors that I want,
and people can deal with it?
A few years ago, using color on the web was a
real issue. Because of the differences in platform displays of
colors, the measly 256 colors that monitors could display was
reduced to a pitiful 216 colors that were available for "safe"
web viewing. When people refer to "safe", they mean there are
only 216 colors that all major platforms, monitors and video
cards will display. So people will see your web page the way you
intended, albeit under a restricted color choice.
I don't know about you, but 216 colors are just
not enough for me to express myself fully. Especially when you
consider that most of these colors are never used. Some of those
muddy orange colors are just not in style these days and most of
the very dark colors and very light colors are pretty much
useless for day-to-day use.
In Photoshop, you can set the preferences of all
of the color options to let you choose only web-safe colors. See
below:
This looks like a lot of colors, but it is only
216 total. By turning off the Web only colors checkbox, do you
run the risk of having people view your page is weird colors
that their computer is generating to try and fake it? Yes. But
the risk is growing smaller every day.
The current statistics say that the vast
majority of people can view at least 65,000 colors on their
monitors. In fact, it is thought that as many as 94% of people
can view at least this many. 10% can view millions of colors on
their monitors. I would venture to guess that 10% is a little
bit low.
So what should you do? Well, I say ditch the 216
color web-safe palette and do what you want. There is not an
option in Photoshop for displaying and selecting only the 65,000
colors that most people can see. But you are probably pretty
safe when choosing most, if not all colors. Computers will fake
the rest of the colors by dithering available colors together to
make it look pretty close.
So the bottom line is to start creating for the
new generation. Stop using that heinous 216 color palette and
explore the greater good of at least 65,000 colors. This give
you so many more options to choose from, that you are sure to
enjoy yourself so much more.
Now I have to give myself a little disclaimer. I
can't be responsible if you do a job for a client in millions of
colors when most of the users are on older computers. You will
have to do a little research for each job you do (this should be
standard anyway) to find out what sort of systems people are
using. If the majority of your users will only have access to
256 colors, then use the 216 color web-safe palette. You should
always think about your users when creating pages and choosing
colors anyway. It will make you a much better designer.
So with that, I will bid you farewell. Remember,
more options for color does not mean use all of them in a single
page. Pace yourself. But you can create a much more engaging
site with more color options, even I your color scheme is
monochromatic. |