Why only 216?

My granddaughter explained this to me twice, and then I went to the library and read it for myself, so here it is the way I understand it.

Plenty of computers can only show 256 colors on the screen at one time. It's the older video cards, a lot of laptops, most of the machines in school labs, and anybody who never went into the display settings to turn it up. Out of those 256, Windows holds back a few for its own menus and buttons, and the Macintosh has its own set. The browser makers settled on the colors that are left over and show up the same on both: six steps of red, six of green and six of blue, the 216 on the chart.

Ask one of those screens for a color that isn't in the 216, and it has to make do. In a picture it does that with a pattern of dots in two or three nearby colors, like a newspaper photo under a magnifying glass. That's called dithering, and your nice smooth peach background turns into a speckled mess. Sometimes the browser just grabs the nearest safe color instead, and your peach comes out pink.

If your own computer shows thousands or millions of colors, you'll never see any of this, which is why so many people don't believe it until they see their page at the library. Stick to the chart and it won't matter what anybody has.

The sixteen names

HTML lets you spell out sixteen colors by name instead of by code: <font color="red">. Only half of them are safe. The other half are halfway amounts (80 is halfway, C0 is three-quarters) that aren't on the chart. Here they are with the safe color I'd use in their place.

Mind that "green" is the dark one. The bright grass green is called "lime." Don't ask me, I didn't name them. Netscape and Explorer will also take a long list of fancier names like "cornflowerblue," but those aren't part of HTML proper, and hardly any of them are safe either. Use the codes.

What reads

Here is what forty years of lettering taught me, and it goes double on a screen. My first boss had a list tacked up over the paint bench of which colors read best together from across a road. I've made each one here out of safe colors. Black on yellow has been at the top of every list like that I've ever seen, which is why school buses and road signs look the way they do.

And here are a few I would not letter on anything, even though I see them on home pages every day:

An old painter's advice

• Pick three colors and stop. One for the background, one for the words, one for the links. Every good sign I ever painted had three colors or fewer, not counting the gold leaf.
• Leave the links blue-ish if you can. People are used to it. If your page is dark, 99CCFF or 66CCFF will do.
• Make visited links close to the others, but duller. 336699 after 0000CC, say. They're still links. They're just the ones you've been to.
• The chart is thin on the soft colors. There's no real cream: FFFFCC is as close as it gets, and it's a little lemony. There's no real tan either; CC9966 is the nearest. Between black and white there are only four grays: 333333, 666666, 999999 and CCCCCC. You learn to work with what's in the can.

Questions, corrections, a color you think I got wrong: write me. I've been wrong about color before. There was a pink bakery sign in 1971 I'd still like to have back.

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Tom Ulmer · [email protected]
Last updated September 19, 1999