Specifying Website Color

The old standard of web safe color (8bit - 256 colors) is fortunately a thing of the past. Most of today's computers are set to use a minimum of 16bit (thousands of colors). This does mitigate most of the need to worry about "web safe color." However, the potential for an image to "dither" even with 16bit color is still present. When you specify a color outside of the 16bit color palette, dithering can occur. Dithering occurs when the computer uses a dot pattern of two colors to display a facsimile of the original color. Dithering makes smooth fields of color appear speckled (see illustration). You can use the 16bit RGB value chart to avoid dithering by picking RGB values that are 16bit safe.

Colors do display darker on PCs than they do on Macs. If you are designing on the Mac you may want to set your gamma to sRGB while designing for the web. This setting will simulate the slightly darker monitor default common to PCs.

The design of form widgets (i.e., pull down menus, submit buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, etc.) cannot always be controlled. Internet Explorer does offer some control over form elements such as their color, and font and size, but even these controls might display differently between Macs and PCs. When designing for the web you might want to specify design standards for form elements, but keep in mind, these specifications will not display consistently across all browsers and platforms.