Color Harmony For The Web - Cailin Boyle

...which is called the Browser-Safe Color Palette (Sometimes known as the Web Safe Palette), which consists of 216 colours which can be represented on the 2 most common computers, PC and Macintosh. Using any other colours outside of this 216 palette will lead to your site colours shifting to its nearest interpretation depending on the browser and operating system.

The bulk of this book takes the 216 colours of the Browser-Safe Color Palette ...
...one of many in the Color Harmony range of books; others include interior design, jewels, pastel etc

This title is a bit hard to find in the UK considering it’s an American publication. A quick search on www.Amazon.co.uk and www.bol.com produce no matches. I personally bought my copy from PC Bookshops (www.pcbooks.co.uk) for £22.50 but I have seen this book many times at design bookshops.

To find out more about ... more

If you ever tried your hand at designing web sites or web pages, you know one of the hardest things is to make it look good! Design is a very subjective matter and where I currently work, we always argue about what looks good or what looks bad especially in the war of designers against developers! Those who work in the web field will know what I mean!

In my opinion, a good looking and working website is usually carefully thought out and designed even before any coding takes place to make the pages. Spend a bit of time planning the functionality and designing the look and navigation will mean that your site will be more presentable, interesting and people will come back as they liked it. OK I know there will be the few who argue that, they haven’t got a design bone in them but just roughly go through the aforementioned steps and your site will gel together that little bit better. But to be totally serious about web design and how it should be done, there are 2 books I highly recommend. One is Jacob Neilson’s ‘Designing Web Usability’ and the other is ‘Color Harmony for the Web’ by Cailin Boyle. I will write a separate opinion for Designing Web Usability at a later date, but for now, I would like to focus your attention to the lighter one of the 2 reads.

Actually tell a lie, I don’t think I could consider ‘Color Harmony for the Web’ as a read. Picking it up for the first time and flicking through its pages, you’ll think that you’ve just picked up the latest brochure for Dulux paints from your local Homebase! In a way that’s exactly what this book is about; it’s a colour scheme book but instead of matching colours for painting your living room, you’re matching colours to be used on web pages instead.

Before I go any further, apologies for the use of the spelling ‘Color’ and not ‘colour’ in places but I’m just referring to the American way of the spelling and anyone who writes HTML will know what I mean!

The book is structured in a very interesting way. The early chapters deal with colour psychology and the technicalities of colour on the web. The web is a very big place indeed and with god knows how many billions (or trillions) of people using different machines, different operating systems and different web browser software to view websites, there should be some standards right? Well technically speaking that’s how it should be but in this money making world, everyone is trying to do things different, so for the web to be standardised is an almost impossible task. Just look at the differences between using Netscape and Internet Explorer and you have a rough idea what I’m talking about.

Thankfully, there is a standard for using colours on the web, which is called the Browser-Safe Color Palette (Sometimes known as the Web Safe Palette), which consists of 216 colours which can be represented on the 2 most common computers, PC and Macintosh. Using any other colours outside of this 216 palette will lead to your site colours shifting to its nearest interpretation depending on the browser and operating system.

The bulk of this book takes the 216 colours of the Browser-Safe Color Palette and turns them into colour schemes for use on your websites. There are pages and pages of colour combinations that are divided into different themes such as Classic, Vibrant, Fresh, Energetic, Professional and so on. Each theme contains some limited case studies of websites which have used a particular theme style. As with most books printed about the web, the web sites featured in the book may be out of date due to the ever-changing nature of web sites, but it makes for an interesting read and illustrates how web sites have used the themes effectively.

Bear in mind, unlike print design, web design is quite different, in that what colours may work for print may not necessarily work for the web. I’ve seen people who have transferred their sales/marketing brochure straight to the web using the same colours as their print mediums, only to come up with hideous results. So the colour combinations here give you a rough indication, what colours go well together on a website.

The last part of the book and by far the most useful, is the colour conversion charts and colour swatches. These pages show all the 216 colours in order with their corresponding numbers with reference to its RGB and HEX values. The HEX values are the ones that are important, as these are what you write in the HTML. RGB values are useful for when you are designing the website in Photoshop.

There might be the few who argue that the 216 colours rule no longer apply, with a lot of web designers opting to go beyond them, but what we have to remember is, that when we design for the web, we have to cater for different machines, operating systems and browsers and maximise the target audience who can view the pages.

So in my opinion, this an essential book for both budding web designers and web developers alike. If anything, it’s a great reference book and you never have to remember the HEX values for a colour again! Even if you don’t decide to use the exact colours and go beyond the 216 palette, the colour combinations will give you a rough idea of what you should be matching!

‘Color Harmony for the Web’ is written by Cailin Boyle and is published by Rockport Publishers, Inc. Its also one of many in the Color Harmony range of books; others include interior design, jewels, pastel etc

This title is a bit hard to find in the UK considering it’s an American publication. A quick search on www.Amazon.co.uk and www.bol.com produce no matches. I personally bought my copy from PC Bookshops (www.pcbooks.co.uk) for £22.50 but I have seen this book many times at design bookshops.

To find out more about this book, visit the Rockport Publishers website @ http://www.rockpub.com

WORD OF WARNING!
DO make sure you buy the second edition of this book as the first printing (which I bought) has several mistakes in it. They’re not small ones either! Some of the colours have been printed incorrectly thus it can be frustrating. An errata sheet can be downloaded at the website for owners of the first printing, but if you are thinking of buying this book, check to see if it’s the second edition.

 

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