Create interest with color and set the mood.
What does the color scheme on this page make you feel? My goal for this page and the others on this website was to convey a feeling of confidence, authority and comfort. Color helped set this feel or mood.

Color can be the single most factor in attracting visitors and conveying the mood you want to set. Using dark somber colors tells the visitor this is a serious website with content that should be read or studied. Blues will set pretty much the same mood except with a lighter touch and friendlier feel. Reds, yellows and oranges convey a warm mood and possibly light hearted content. Purples are somewhere in between. Pastels colors set a much softer mood and will create a more feminine ambience for the viewer.

Use bright accent colors to add a touch of quality and richness to your websites. For instance is your design is primarily blues try adding a red or purple line near or around the navigation. Or maybe add a line under the header.

If you were to design a website to sell children's toys what colors would you choose? Who would your audience be? Children or their parents? It would be both so you want to appeal to both audiences without alienating either. Choose a colorful color scheme that's not too wild and crazy.

Color can work for your web site and printed materials in various ways:

• Color emphasizes, highlights, and leads the eye to important points or links.
• Color identifies recurring themes (i.e. titles and subtitles are usually the same colors).
• Conversely, color can differentiate, such as different colors in pie charts and bar graphs.
• Color symbolizes and triggers emotions and associations.

What's the difference between RGB and hexadecimal colors?

Palette Basics
Limited color palettes were very important in the early days of the Web when most people used monitors that could only display 256 colors or less. Lower color resolution monitors are now becoming increasingly rare and the dithering problems associated with restricted palettes are gradually disappearing. Statistics now show that the instance of 8-bit monitors has dropped below 10% of total Web users. So, you only need to be concerned with palettes if you suspect that your viewers, for some reason, are still using older systems.

Keep in mind, having thousands of colors to choose from can free the designer to spend more time on content and design and less time struggling to create appealing color schemes. How bland art would be with only a few colors to choose from! When a painter starts to create a painting, he or she can have as many tubes of paint as they need. Having a restricted palette is like having only a few flavors of ice cream to choose from for dessert.

What you see on this page depends on which color depth your monitor is set to.

In 16-bit or 24-bit, all the images will look about right with only subtle differences.
If your monitor is set to 8-bits (256 colors), the results will vary from 'slightly dithered' to 'totally wrong'.

This is the standard Macintosh System Palette saved as an 8-bit GIF file with its own palette.
Only two slots are reserved for the Macintosh interface - the White and Black. All the other colors are 'removable".

How this palette looks on your screen will give an idea of how well your browser re-maps the colors If you can see any dithering it is because you are running in 8-bit mode and the color does not have a close equivalent in the 6x6x6 web palette. back to top

This typical Windows 95 Palette starts with Black and ends with White. Again, this is saved as an 8-bit GIF file with its own palette.

The first and last ten colors in the palette are reserved by Windows and include the standard 16 VGA colors plus four extra SVGA colors, light yellow, light green, light blue and a mid gray. The other 236 colors are normally "re-mappable" to any colors you like.

This palette is not 'set in stone' like the Macintosh palette and is the default, out-of-the-box,Windows 95 palette. The default system palette may change if the user introduces a pictorial backdrop or opens any program or picture file that uses a different palette.
How this palette looks on your screen will give a good indication of how well your browser re-maps the colors. back to top