Many years ago when the internet was first available to the
general public, and most people thought it was the latest fad, the internet
didn’t have color. Anything you saw
online had a grey screen with black type. You could surf a topic and get to the
end of available pages for that topic quickly.
Of course we have gone quit far in a short amount of time.
The color system put into place for the internet is called hexadecimal
color which is a combination of letters and numbers put together to represent a
specific color. Anyone that has worked
in offset printing has worked with CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) or
Pantone color systems, and hexadecimal is a color system providing web safe
colors. Although color has come a long
way there are still some hues that don’t convert nicely to viewing on a screen
so it is important we always choose from web safe colors for anything that will
be viewed digitally.
I personally use Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator to
choose my hexadecimal colors but not everyone can afford these programs. There is a way to calculate the color code
using RGB (red, green, blue) values. An
RGB color is going to have a value that ranging from 0 to 255. For example this color used 175 red, 40 green
and 40 blue.
To convert this to a hexadecimal color I would use a formula
that looks something like this one:
R/16 = X + y/16
G/16 = X + y/16
B/16 = X + y/16
G/16 = X + y/16
B/16 = X + y/16
Or for the color we have our formula would look like:
175/16 = X + y/16
40/16 = X + y/16
40/16 = X + y/16
40/16 = X + y/16
40/16 = X + y/16
The whole number will be ‘x’ and the remainder as a decimal
would be ‘y’.
175/16 = 11 + 0/16
40/16 = 2 + .5/16
40/16 = 2 + .5/16
40/16 = 2 + .5/16
40/16 = 2 + .5/16
Take the decimal point number times 16 to get a whole
number.
175/16 = 11 + 0/16
40/16 = 2 + 8 /16
40/16 = 2 + 8/16
40/16 = 2 + 8 /16
40/16 = 2 + 8/16
So if we take out our calculations we have:
11, 0, 2, 8, 2, 8
Numbers are represented in 1 – 9, but we have 11 as one of
our calculations. Starting with 10 we
replace the number with the coordinating letter for that number.
10 = A, 11 = B, 12 = C, 13 = D, 14=E, 15=F (it doesn’t go higher than 15).
So our hexadecimal color would be: B02828
The color converted nicely from our original.
Ok, so you don’t really want to go through all this effort
to choose colors so I suggest finding a color chart online. Not usually as
complete of an option as calculating but will at least get you rolling visually
with color. I recommend using http://w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp.
Happy Coloring! ;)
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