Web Safe Colors Explored @ OWDC

LESSON 1-04-02: Web Safe Colors Explored

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This lesson of your free online web design course is dedicated to the exploration of web safe colors.

In the world of computers, "interpretation" means a lot. Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser interprets many HTML tags in a different way from Netscape's Netscape Navigator. Macintosh interprets word documents in a different way from Windows does. What does this chaos serve?

Apart from "heating up" the competition between IT firms, this chaos serves as a "nuisance" for web designers who wish nothing but to see order on the web. All this competition makes life so much harder for web designers, as they have to make thier websites compatible with every platform to please their boss. This is not an easy task.

Even colors used on the web have become tools for this silly competition between IT companies and their lust for "setting their own standards". Web designers are only limited to a small sum of 216 colors if they want their websites to appear with the same colors on all platforms and reach all of their visitors. These 216 colors are called "web safe colors".

In short, "web safe colors" are colors that will display correctly on any platform, regardless of the operating system or browser which is capable of displaying 8-bit color depth (256 colors). The web safe color palette consists of 216 colors and not 256, because of some fundamental differences between the Windows and Macintosh platforms on the interpretation of hex codes. What a surprise! :(

All in all, it is advisable that you pick your colors from inside the web safe color palette when designing your websites to appeal to the greater audiance and reach more people. That is not only because of the difference in the interpretation of colors between different platforms; it's that many people still use old computers which support only 256 colors. Keep in mind that if you do not use web safe colors, your website will not appear the same to everyone - or worse - your website will look horrible!

However, if your target audiance is more homogenous and you can overlook platform specific color requirements, then feel free to use any color you like! It's just a matter of choice.

Sidenote #1: Check out my web design resources page to download a superb eBook!

Sidenote #2: If you enjoyed this lesson, please link to it :)

In the next lesson of your free web design course, I'll show you web safe colors and their corresponding hex codes.

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Nearby Lessons:

• Lesson 1-02 Fundamental HTML Tags
• Lesson 1-03 Basic Text Formatting
• Lesson 1-04 Web Colors Unleashed

• Lesson 1-04-01 Introduction to color hex codes

• Lesson 1-04-02 Web safe colors explored

• Lesson 1-04-03 Web safe color palette
• Lesson 1-05 HTML Tables
• Lesson 1-06 Background Alteration

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WEB COLORS UNLEASHED!