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Visibone Adds "Unsafe" Color Chart

Posted by michael on from the useful-and-pretty-too dept.

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."

1 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The original was a good idea, but... by BobSteinVisiBone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Really!? Oh boy, do I have a pleasant surprise for you. The newer poster (since 12/99) has much brighter dark colors, like burnished ceramic instead of sunbleached roadkill. And it has decimal codes on each chip. And the logo is MUCH brighter!

    Please write me and tell me where to send it. I am certain you'll find it more accurate in the darker shades.

    Do I understand correctly, you're saying that 1068 colors is not enough to be useful? Obviously it's a subset by a factor of 16,000. The whole of 24-bit color would take a foot-ball-field size poster.

    What I tried to do in the KiloChart was spread the colors out even perceptually not mathematically. Notice how quickly the web safe colors transition from red to yellow? And how many limey greens there are that all look alike? I tried to correct that. I've tried picking from it a few times and have only once found the need to do the tweaking you mention. Once I did want a really subtle pastel color. I didn't find it on the KiloChart and had to tweak.

    So my question is, can a paper color picker be useful even with only 1000 colors. (If you'll grant me for the time being, until you see it at least, that it's accurate.) Can it get you to a color that's good enough say more than half the time?

    Have I understood your point right?

    Say thanks for all the kind words. I'm really glad you found the poster useful. Please don't be too polite to tell me straight. I really want to get this right. If not this batch the next one. All the email I get is so schmaltzy I need to hear some thoughtful criticism.

    Did I say I really want to get you the newer poster?

    -- Bob Stein, VisiBone, stein@visibone.com

    --
    Bob Stein, http://bobste.in