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<coloring web graphics> | |
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A Book Review
By: Carol J. Elkins March 1997 |
Take a brief spin through the Web and you'll see some pretty bad color combinations--some garish and some that lose detail when overlaid (like black text on dark purple). Although I'm sure there are individuals who truly relish puce green and violet together, not all of the blame for these combinations can be placed on the Web page author. Often, your own Web browser or operating system is the culprit, changing colors that look good in print or on screen into eyeball-offending monstrosities.
To avoid this danger, you need to use "browser-safe" colors. You can find these colors, richly laid out in easy-to-use palettes, in <coloring web graphics> by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin (New Riders Publishing, 1996, ISBN 1-56205-669-7). Whether you work with color professionally, or whether words like "hexadecimal'' and "bit-depth'' make your eyes glaze over, you will find this book a good tool to help you gain control of how Web browsers handle the color on your Web page.
I approached this book from the glazed-over-eyes point of view. To be honest, what really caught my eye were pages of pictures (over half the book, actually) of clearly organized color groups and swatches. I quickly located the page where FFCCFF (the background color I use on all of my Web pages) was illustrated. There, in neat little colored squares, were all the colors that would look good for my text, links, and graphics with their respective hex numbers (what you code in HTML) and red-green-blue values.
Armed with the free CD that comes with the book, I loaded my HTML editor and my graphics program and went to work creating browser-safe graphics and text for my Web pages. The CD contains hundreds of color lookup tables to load into Photoshop, Painter, Freehand, Photo-Paint, and PaintShop Pro; swatches that include suggested color schemes for your Web pages; and lots of browser-safe clipart. This book made it easy.
The authors state that one of their goals in this book is to help you choose
colors that look good and work consistently over Web browsers and across
all platforms. They do this by using platform-neutral examples and by spreading
their examples across many platforms so that no one feels left out.
"We consider our role to be translators of technical information, to make Web color accessible to people who want to use these colors." Although both authors are artists, they would make good technical writers, too. The whole topic of color is daunting, but they write about color using words that I easily understand. After using this book, I feel like I cut a pretty good path through an area of technical communication that only the brave (or artistic) dare to tread.
For more information, visit the <coloring web graphics> site at http://www.lynda.com/bookstore/
(Book graphics used with permission)
Copyright © 1997
Carol J. Elkins
A Written
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