Thursday's recommended reading

Written by Adrian Holovaty on October 4, 2002

ColorMatch 5K is an incredibly useful tool. Select a color, and it'll return complimentary colors. Problem is, it doesn't work in Mozilla. But it's fine in IE. (Link from xBlog)

Wired News: Reality Check for Web Design. "Despite progress, websites today are still three times harder for users with disabilities to use than for other users." And while we're on the subject, Microsoft.com's redesign is quite inaccessible and has lousy code, to boot.

Comments

Posted by Jed on October 7, 2002, at 6:21 p.m.:

I notice that it includes non-websafe colors. Is websafe still an issue?

Posted by Adrian on October 7, 2002, at 11:51 p.m.:

Depends on whom you ask. From my experience, some people still swear by Web-safe colors, while others have moved on.

I used to be a huge Web-safe proponent, but I've changed my ways. (The background color on this site, for instance, is not Web-safe.) I think decent monitors are widespread enough for Web designers to make the leap. (I also think images shouldn't be limited 72 dpi, but that's another story. :) )

Posted by Rob on October 8, 2002, at 7:14 p.m.:

Yeah, I used to only speak in 00, 33, 66, 99, cc, and ff when it came to colors, but these days I rarely visit Lynda Weinman's site to utilize her web-safe palette. Web-safe colors, though, did inspire me to learn how to convert hex color to RGB values using a calculator -- something I'm proud of (I think).

Posted by Jay Small on October 10, 2002, at 4:16 a.m.:

I find myself still falling back on Web-safe for any colors through which I intend to display significant blocks of text, either overprint or reversed. But if I'm searching for complementary colors, contrasts or accents, a tool such as this one helps a lot, Web-safe or not.

Posted by kpaul on October 11, 2002, at 3:10 a.m.:

this is a very cool tool. thanks for bringing it to my attention.

being 'color blind' to slight variations in hue, the auto 'set' colors feature is very nice....

here's a color tool i use sometimes:

http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/

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