Web Design and Color
Tints Tones and Shades
Color harmony can also be produced using tints, tones and shades of various parent colors.
Shades are produced by mixing a parent color with black (A).
Tones are produced by mixing the color with gray (B).
Tints are produced by mixing a color with white (C).
The color triangle on the left demonstrates these concepts. Most graphic editing programs will provide palettes for producing these color variations.
Try our HTML Color Tool
Color and Web Browsers
Web browsers are limited in the number of colors they can display. Be careful in choosing colors that can't be displayed by a web browser. Its color substitutions can severly distort the appearance of your website.
The Safe Color List which was compiled in 1997 and was supposed to be a list of 216 colors that would display the same on all web browsers. The list was recently reduced to about 11 stable colors in a study done by WebMonkey.
To be safe KEEP IT SIMPLE!! and stick to basics.
Some Simple Rules of Good Website Design
- Less is better. Don't overdo it with color. Don't use more than 2 or 3 in your web design.
- Choose colors that are somehow related. Don't just grab 2 or 3 and go.
