Colour Limitations

[Steve51]

It may or may not come as a surprise to you that a colour code like "#F2C3BE" results in different colours on different systems, depending on the number of colours in your visitors' colour palettes, their monitors, etc.

For example, if Web Developers choose a colour that looks good on your 24-bit colour system ("True Color" on Windows, "millions of colors" on Mac), and your visitor goes to your site using a 256 colour setting on his system, your colour will be dithered to fit into the more limited number of colours in his palette.

What looks to you like beautiful shades of colours may thus turn out to be ugly combinations on a different system.

Of course, few people use 256 colours on their system anymore. As such, many webmasters are abandoning the old technique of only using colour combinations that are multiples of the hexadecimal "33" (which are supposed to be safe to use in that they display fairly similarly across the main platforms).

However, if you think that you can now use the next lowest denominator, the 16-bit colour setting ("High Color" on Windows, "thousands of colors" on Mac) safely, think again. Contrary to what you might expect, the 16-bit colour palette is not a subset of the 24-bit colour palette: apart from black and white, the colours in the two palettes are not identical. If you design the colour scheme of your site while working from one palette, be sure to switch to the other colour setting to make sure that your colour scheme blends well in the other setting as well.

[chickenfeather]

Hrm, somewhat useful info for graphics, but this seems like it would be better in the artists corner. Btw welcome to the forums.

[woutR]

This is stealth promotion of the 'web developers' I think.

[Cruor]

lol, anyone not using truecolor deserves a shitty web browsing experience. Same with users of IE6. It's such a fuckin' waste to work around imbeciles.

[*BlackFox]

This is stealth promotion of the 'web developers' I think.

Yeah, I think so to!

[lavapockets]

This is stealth promotion of the 'web developers' I think.

+1