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."

Comments

The original was a good idea, but...

[realgone]

Heck, I've got a years-old copy of the "safe" poster hanging on my office wall right now. But this new "unsafe" version really seems like it's fulfilling a need that doesn't exist.

The "safe" poster was truly handy for picking common palettes along HSB (hue/saturation/brightness) lines. e.g., "Wow, that's the perfect web-safe shade of blue. Now if I could only find a more subdued version of the same exact hue to use elsewhere in my site."

Once you break free of those 216-color constraints, however, you're probably much better off using any color picker's HSB sliders to create your site palette. Not only do you give yourself more flexibility, but you avoid potential problems caused by picking a color that looks great on a CMYK printed poster, but looks entirely different on an RGB monitor.

I would like to know...

[OneFix]

How is a list of unsafe colors going to help you more than a safe color palette?

And why are these so freaking popular? Lets see...

Just do what I did and do a search on google for "web safe colors"...

It turns up tons of pages like This One...

And in this case, it is simply much easier to look up the color you want and just do a Copy and Paste...

The other thing I don't quite get with this is that it if you use a web page with the "safe color" palette to find colors, wouldn't that be a more accurate interpretation of the end result (monitor instead of a poster)?

I know some ppl claim they are helpful...however, I personally think they are just an excuse for a decoration.

By all means, if you want a poster to hang on your wall, go for it...as for me, I'm gonna save the $$$ and use a web page...

Flaw in the Visibone concept

[Gryffin]

One big problem with this chart, and all the Visibone products: reflective (printed) color is *never* gonna match up well to screen color. Big show stopper there.

To make matters worse, they overlay text, in white or black, over the color samples, which alters the perception of the colors.

What I'd *love* to see them produce is an on-screen version of their charts, sans labels. See a color you like, roll your cursor over it, and up pops the HTML color value. You could do this with a big GIF on a Web page, with a big honkin' image map over it to supply the pop-up values. Even better, make it so if you click a color, it'll take you to another page that gives you useful options such as viewing text in the chosen color against backgrounds of another color, or v/v. Now THAT I could use.