| How do computers see color? Well, it depends on the computer. And that dilemma has been a pain in the side of web designers and programmers since the beginning of time. Ok, maybe not for that long, but at least since the beginning of the web. The computer doesn't really see colors, it reads numbers. The computer reads hexadecimal numbers. These hexadecimal numbers represent colors to the computer. For example, the number for black is 000000 and the number for white is ffffff. But you might be asking how can I say "ffffff" is a number. Well in a way, it is to the computer. Hexadecimal color codes are made up of combinations of these "numbers"; 00, 33, 66, 99, cc and ff. Therefore, white is made of the combination of three ff's (ffffff), black is the combination of three 00's (000000), red is made up of one ff and two 00's (ff0000) and green is made up of 00 + ff + 00 (00ff00). How do you know what number to use for a certain color? There are several ways to find out what number to use. The first is a color chart. There are many hexadecimal color charts on the web. Click this link to view the color chart I use the most. This particular color chart is a list of a group of specific colors called web-safe colors. There are 216 colors that are considered web-safe because every computer is expected to display these colors uniformly. When computers first came on the market, they could only display a total of 256 different colors. The web-safe colors are a subset of these 256 colors. Most web designers have been taught to use these web-safe colors when designing webpages. However, things are starting to get better for these poor, color starved web designers. Over the past few years the computer has come a long way. Today, most computers can display 16 million colors. That gives the web designer 16 million choices. The decision to continue to use web-safe colors or not depends on your audience. If you think the majority of your website visitors will be using older computers that can only display 256 colors, then you should continue to use the web-safe colors for a little while longer. If you think that most of your audience has newer computers, then you have more color choices. But you still need a way to find out what hexadecimal number corresponds to each color. There are other color charts that contain more colors. But you are still limited to the colors on the chart. To get beyond this limitation of a chart, you can use software that displays the hexadecimal numbers for the colors you choose. Most graphic software programs such as PhotoshopR or Paint ShopTM Pro R have this feature. But if you don't have one of these graphics programs, you can use a simple stand-alone program that does the same thing. The program that I use is the ColorCache. You can find out more about this program in my article (see menu). |
Save to Del.icio.us
