Taking Your Talent to the Web- P6:It was a simple solution to a complex problem. On one side, thousands of designers and art directors are eager to take their talents to the Web but aren’t sure how. On the other, web agencies could not find enough good web designers to get their work done. | 56 WHY Designing for the Medium Color My Web Monitors that are limited to 256 colors face an additional problem in that up to 40 of these colors are used up in advance by the operating system itself. For instance Windows reserves 40 Windows system colors for its own display purposes in lower-end color environments. That leaves exactly 216 colors at your disposal. In 1994 the makers of Netscape Navigator mathematically subdivided the color spectrum into 216 web-safe colors which are equidistant from each other along the color wheel. You will hear this mathematical arrangement of web-safe colors variously referred to as the Netscape Color Cube the web-safe palette and variations thereof many of them unprintable in a family publication. The Color Cube is the bane of many web designers existence but it need not be. Paper stocks have limitations so do type families and so does the Web. This is one of those limitations you can master upon accepting it as part of the discipline the medium imposes. Know the Code Photoshop 5 and higher includes a web-safe color palette and the included VisiBone color palette is even more useful because it arranges the colors in ways with which designers can understand and work. But how can you tell in code alone if your colors are web-safe Easy. Know the code. In HTML all colors are indicated in three pairs six digits of hexadecimal code. This for instance is red ff0000. And this is a darker red cc0000. What are these little characters They are hexadecimal code for the Red Green and Blue channels of an RGB monitor. The first two digits indicate the amount of light pouring from the monitor s Red channel the second pair tells how much Green appears and the third tells how much Blue. With ff0000 the Red channel is going full blast ff is the highest possible two-digit value in hexadecimal and the other two channels are turned off 00 . Most of the time you will be working with subtler color values. Web-safe colors are composed only of the .
