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Color

ASU COLORS
MORE ABOUT COLOR
ONLINE COLOR PICKERS
PRIMARY & SECONDARY COLORS
RGB VS. CMYK
WEB-SAFE COLORS

PRIMARY & SECONDARY COLORS
These colors are intense, saturated, gaudy, bright. Using ONE of them in a design is usually quite enough—unless you’re trying to produce a loud, gaudy effect on your site. But note that you don’t need to use ANY of these six colors in your designs.

There are three primary and three secondary colors; secondaries (the middle row in the table) are created by combining two primaries (shown here on both the top and bottom rows).

See more about using the color wheel to choose combinations.

RGB VS. CMYK
If you’ve specified color for print design work, you learned about CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black). CMYK applies to ink. Since there’s no ink on a computer screen, the calculation of colors for online use is based on light. There’s no black because where light is concerned, black is the absence of all light. RGB means red, green and blue.

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Please move away from the primary and secondary colors toward a more sophisticated scheme that will make your pages look appealing. (You can use black and white for free: They don’t subtract from your three or four palette colors.)

• Colors on the Web
  Interesting info about the meaning of red.
  
  
• Choosing Website Colors
  What colors mean to Web visitors and how to apply different color combinations to your site.

• The Color Wizard
  Click the Launch the Color Wizard button. Type in a hex code, then click SET, or use the sliders to change colors.
• Spin the Color Wheel
  Click the Spin the Color Wheel button. When you find a color you like, click HOLD. Keep doing that until you find a harmonious palette.
• Color Palette Creator
  This fabulous tool allows you to input one base color (then click OK) and see a range of tints (blended with white) and shades (blended with black).
• Color Palette Generator
  Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a color palette that matches a key image on your page.
  
• Color Toy
  This site is fun. You can enter a hex code or try the Random button at the far right.
• Color Scheme Generator
  Lots of buttons to push and play with. Pick any color and see monochrome, contrast, triad, tetrad and analogic color palettes. VERY useful for Web designers.
• Colorcube
  See how your text color and link colors will look against your background color.
• Adobe Kuler
  You can quickly create harmonious color themes on this site or download color schemes created by others.
  
• Color Schemes
  This easy application lets you submit your favorite color scheme and vote for others.
  
• EasyRGB: Color Harmonies
  This complex color-picking aid can help you find complementary colors. In the menu labeled RGB Range (bottom left inside the box), you can change the value to 0-FF and enter the Web hexadecimal values in the three boxes. Then click Start to get a set of colors.
• Colour Lovers
  Check out the latest color trends and palettes.
  

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For example, if you put a non-Web-safe color in the background of a JPG, you won’t necessarily get a perfect match with your page background.

All Web-safe colors are made up of three pairs of two identical hexadecimal numerals. There are only six pairs in the Web-safe universe, so you can memorize them if you want to:

• 00 (no color)
• 33
• 66
• 99
• CC
• FF (most color)

If you’re wondering how CC and FF can be numerals, you CAN look up “hexadecimal” in a dictionary.

The three pairs correlate to RGB or red-green-blue. The first pair determines the amount of red, the second pair the amount of green and the third pair the amount of blue.

• 000000 — black
• FF0000 — brightest red
• 00FF00 — brightest green
• 0000FF — brightest blue
• FFFFFF — white

If you’re good at math, you probably already figured out that 216 derives from 6 to the 3rd power, or 6 x 6 x 6, which equals 216: Six possible pairs in three slots.

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MORE ABOUT COLOR

Investing some time in learning about color theory will pay off by enabling you to design more compelling and attractive Web sites.

• WORQX Color Theory
  An excellent tutorial about color. You may want to start with the Color Combinations page.
• Color, Contrast & Dimension
  A deep introduction to using color, this site provides a full seminar on how colors work together. If you’ve never taken a class in color theory, you’ll learn a lot from it.
• Color Wheel Made Vertical
  A simple view of Web color values.
• Lynda's Weinman's page on the topic
  For more about the browser-safe palette.