Color on the Web 33PrinciplesWeb DesignColor on the WebWeb Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Editiontage. Because you knowexactlywhich colors will render accurately on Macs and
PCs, you can use these colors exclusively when designing your graphics and
HTML pages and beat the browser to the task. It requires a little extra effort, but
the advantage is that you’ll be able to predict what the pages will look like for all
users. Using web-safe colors in graphics production is discussed in Chapter 17.
If you choose to add color to the background and text on your web pages,
chances are you’ll need to do some experimenting with color to get the combina-
tions just right. There are a number of tools and options for selecting web-safe
colors and incorporating them into your designs.
Web authoring tools
Many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring tools (including
Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, GoLive Cyberstudio, and Claris HomePage 3.0), allow
you to choose from swatches of web-safe colors when applying color to text and
backgrounds. You can see the results of your choices immediately in the applica-
tion window or when previewed in a browser. These tools will automatically
generate all the necessary HTML code for you.
Photoshop swatches
If you do not have a web-authoring application, you can experiment with colors in
a Photoshop file by loading the web-safe colors into the Swatches palette (see
Chapter 17 for instructions on creating a Web Palette CLUT file). Using the
eyedropper tool, you can then be sure that the colors you select for backgrounds
and text are web-safe. You need to note the RGB values for your final color selec-
tions, then convert them to their hexadecimal equivalents for insertion into the
HTML color attribute tags in your document.
Online design utilities
There are a number of utilities online that allow you to choose color combina-
tions from the Web Palette and see a sample page with your chosen colors
immediately.
ColorMaker (by Sam Choukri)
http://www.bagism.com/colormaker/
This page allows you to set page elements to web-safe colors and automati-
cally displays your color choices in a separate window. It also generates the
HTML code for the colors, which you can copy into your document. This tool
requires a Java-enabled browser and prefers Netscape Navigator 4.0 or
Internet Explorer 4.0.
NED’s DynaColor!
http://www.nedesign.com/COLOR/
This is another tool for experimenting with background and text color combi-
nations. You enter your RGB values in either decimal or hex format, and
DynaColor! generates a sample page. You can choose to have your color
selections shifted to the nearest web-safe color.