web safe colours?

Question

Is it still relevant to consider these? I don't do much work on the graphics side of things, but recently I set the background colour of a webpage (using CSS) to the same background colour used within images on the page. #312F32. it looked fine on different machines in the office, but at home on my shinny new mac (and a few others since) there was definitely a noticeable difference between the two.

can someone give me a web colour 101 reminder course? :>

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Reference:

• For an e.g. this site indicates if a chosen colour is web safe or not.

Answer 1

personally I feel that it's not really of that much of importance, since nowadays modern browsers can render colours properly. What is important is that your background image colour should be the same as the background colour.

different of colour between monitors might just be that the monitor settings are different. so you don't have to worry that much.

what's really important for web designs is that your design have to be appealing.

Answer 2

is it still relevant to consider these?

No. To be honest there was never a truly ‘web-safe’ palette, in that many systems had different colour depths and palettes even in the days when a Windows machine running in 8-bit colour was the norm.

Today there's very little still running an 8-bit palette, and those things that do aren't necessarily using the same one.

it looked fine on different machines in the office, but at home on my shinny new mac (and a few others since) there was definitely a noticable difference between the two.

A shiny new Mac will definitely be running in full colour like everyone else, so it's not a palette problem.

Was the image a PNG? If so, you've probably got a gamma problem causing colour shifts on different platforms. PNGs for the web should be saved without a gAMA chunk to avoid this issue.