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The Browser Safe Color Palette
For those of you unfamiliar with my books,
Designing Web Graphics,
Deconstructing Web Graphics,
Coloring Web Graphics; they go into great detail
about subjects which may be new to you, such as dithering, CLUTs, palettes,
and 8-bit color. The palettes below are offered on the CD-ROM that comes
with the book, and are available free here on the Web. Note: you do
NOT have to buy, or promise to buy, my book s to use these palettes.
They are offered here freely with no strings attached.
The Browser Safe palette, as I so named it, is the actual palette that
Mosaic, Netscape and Internet Explorer use within their browsers. The
palettes used by these browsers are slightly different on Macs and PCs. This
palette is based on math, not beauty. I didn't and wouldn't have picked the
colors in this palette, but Netscape, Mosaic and Internet Explorer did,
so...
The Browser Safe Palettes only contain 216 colors out of a possible 256.
That is because the remaining 40 colors vary on Macs and PCs. By eliminating
the 40 variable colors, this palette is optimized for cross-platform use.
The Browser Safe Palette should not be used to remap color photographs.
It is better to use an adaptive palette (with no dithering,if possible) and
let the end-browser do any additional dithering. I have a
test page which proves this point.
The Browser Safe Palette is useful for flat-color illustrations, logos
with flat-color, and areas in any image that have a lot of a single color.
When a browser dithers flat colors it looks far more objectionable than when
it dithers photographs. Look at this
test page, which demonstrates this very
point.
Since this palette was generated by math, not visual
insightfulness, I hired my dear friend Joy Silverman, who spent 60 hours of
her life re-arranging it so it might make sense to visual designers. There
are two versions here; one organized by hue and one organized by value. You
may copy either from these pages and distribute them freely to whomever
might want to make better looking Web pages from them. [only one show at top
of page - jno]
Special thanks to
Bruce Heavin who spent hours with me at
my house, going back and forth from my Mac to my PC, trying to figure this
out - and succeeding!