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Visibone Adds "Unsafe" Color Chart
proub writes "If you're one of the zillions of designers who love your Visibone web-safe-palette mouse pads or posters, thought I'd mention that they seem to have added an "unsafe palette" poster as well. If you haven't seen them before, suffice to say it's a great way to find safe color combinations that work (the Color Lab doesn't suck, either). I refer to the web-palette poster constantly when doing www work, nice to have a similar version for GUI design where you have the whole big messy world of colors available."
Just to clarify, Mr. RealGone, the poster was never printed using 4-color process CMYK. I invented an 8-color process to match screen colors, had some inks custom blended by Superior Ink. If you got the first edition of the original poster (Feb-Dec 1999) I made a pretty big improvement after that in the color matching. 4D iterative interpolation was involved but of course I'm showing off to say so. (In short, ink color doesn't add or subtract, it multiplies.) So, have you held up one of the recent color references (poster, mouse pad, card) next to the screen? I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. -- Bob Stein, VisiBone, stein@visibone.com
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
(1) OneFix said: "How is a list of unsafe colors going to help?" Just to have a quick way to get a color you have in mind with more choices, that's what I was hoping. Web safe colors give short shrift to earth-tones and pastels for example.
(2) Re looking up a color is easier online. For me, sometimes it is easier online, sometimes it isn't. I make both (color lab). Most software when it is running and in front of you still takes twiddling to get what you want. Personally, when I have a poster in front of me I just happen to use it to pick colors. It's like the HTML Popup reference I give away for free versus the HTML Card I sell. When I have both in front of me, I reach for the card. (Was that a shameless self-promotion? Ok, I know, but do you think it was an effective shameless self-promotion?)
A chart is one way to envision all the options at once. Personally I like seeing the totality of a thing. I've never seen a color picker that does that. The best show a 2D pattern (HS or SB) with a knob for the 3rd dimension (B or H). So you can only see one slice of the choice-space at a time.
(3) Accuracy of poster versus monitor. I think you'll find the stuff I made using 8 inks matches screen colors far better than anything else. Have you seen one next to a monitor? It's way more faithful than Pantone's ColorWeb for example. First I picked six inks to match the extremes, R,Y,G,C,B,M, and added a seventh because pink is too hot to make with just red and magenta (my pink ink is very close to process magenta actually). Four of those colors were custom blended by Superior Ink. They assigned 6-character pseudo-Pantone numbers for them. The rest are PMS spot colors. Then whenever I print something I'm in the pressroom the whole time and after wrestling with the registration I get the pressman to tweak the 7 colors (plus process black) so they look like the colors between a PC and a Mac but favoring the PC. I've read a lot about monitor gamma, but actually the PC distortion of colors isn't modeled well by a gamma curve, it's very linear with a discontinuity. I wrote about that a while back here. Anyway, after the first print-run I got colorimeter measurements for all the inks and then I modelled the multiplicative effects of offset printing in order to determine the best screen percentages of two inks and black to get a specific RGB color. Ok, more information than you wanted? I just wish you would *see* the thing next to its monitor redition and tell me if you don't think it matches well enough to be useful.
(4) An excuse for decoration? Exactly! What, your walls are pristine white and free of marks or something?
-- Bob Stein, VisiBone, stein@visibone.com
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
It has a GIF with plain colors and nothing over them (unlike the site OneFix mentioned at internet.com which has little dots in each color sample). It has a big positively honkin' JavaScript image map so you can pick any of those, and while you're hovering over them you can see the codes in the status bar. Then when you pick colors you see all their combinations of text on background on the right (no new page, same page).
Isn't this darn tootin' close to what you were describing? It gets about 10,000 users a week.
-- Bob Stein, VisiBone, stein@visibone.com
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in