Colors on the Web

Websafe Colors

Please Note: Web Safe Colors are really a thing of the past. They are not relevant any more and can be safely ignored. I am really just keeping this page here for nostalgic and curiosity reasons.

If you have been doing web design for a few years, you probably remember web-safe colors. This used to be a hot issue with many web designers who were dedicated to the user of only web-safe colors. If you are curios as to what they are and how they came about, please read more below.

What Are Web-Safe Colors?

Back in the early days of the internet there was a reason to be concerned about consistency in how browsers displayed the colors. Many computer screens back then had 8-bit color displays, which could only display 256 different colors. The computer system itself uses some 40 colors, for menus and such, and the remaining 216 colors could be used to display the actual web pages.
Now, 216 colors might sound like quite a bit, but the problem is that no aesthetic considerations were made when these colors were decided, but rather they are based solely on mathematical formulas. To be more exact, the web-safe colors are what you get when you use 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the three different primary colors, and then mix these in every possible combination.

Below are all the websafe colors, along with their hexadecimal values.

Should you use websafe colors?

The proportion of web users with a screen capable of displaying only 256 colors decreases by the day, and today they are virtually non-existant. A page which uses non-web-safe colors is not rendered unreadable, even on these old screens. These sayd you safely deviate from the web-safe colors without needing to feel guilty.

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Colors On the Web
A website dedicated to color theory and its use in web design.