Colors on the Web
Designing with Grey
Design in greyscale first. This enables you to create your page elements and see how they form "color" units and contrast with one another. Once you have created a good page architecture, use your style sheet to colorize the page.
Color Palettes
- The "Browser-safe" Palette
- Complete Color Palette (large, 220 Kb)
- Grey Palette
- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (CMYK) Palette
- Red, Green, Blue (RGB) Palette
Browser Safe?
The so-called "browser safe" colors may dither on certain monitors. On a KDS 17" monitor, the color #333333 dithers. When PhotoShop exports the RGB color (51, 51, 51) (which should translate into #333333 in hexadecimal) into GIF format, it does not dither. "#333333" is supposed to be "browser-safe". Yet, it is not always.
Color Contrast
Visit the Color Vision Resources section of our Resources page to find links to sites discussing color vision and color contrast. Also visit Implementing Standard C of the Section 508 Standards for a discussion of making your pages accessible when using color.