Our book:
Defensive Design for the Web: How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points
Available Now ($16.99)
Most Popular (last 15 days)
Looking for old posts?
37signals Mailing List
37signals Services
Syndicate
Safe Web Colours
04 Jul 2003 by Matthew Oliphant
I may have posted this site in the comments section a while back, but I often use it as a tool, so I thought I would bring it up again.
British Telecom has a site that shows color comparison (side-by-side) palattes for colo(u)r-deficient vision.
The palatte is available in RGB and Hex values and shows examples of “normal” (or not deficient) colors and how the color would look to someone with Protanopia (can’t see reds), Deutanopia (can’t see greens), and Tritanoptia (can’t see blues).
Here are some brief stats on color deficiencies. These stats are US-based. Anyone have stats for other countries?
6 comments so far (Post a Comment)
04 Jul 2003 | p8 said...
I wonder if color-deficient people have an overlapping taste for what looks good and what doesn't with noncolor-deficient people? Although I believe taste is partly biologically predetermined (for picking the nice apple instead of the rotten one, finding a healty partner).
04 Jul 2003 | Ron Zeno said...
Nice article, but there's a couple of things to note:
The web-safe palette doesn't matter much (at all?) these days.
The largest problem with color distinction is not with color deficiencies, but with aging. I can't find good, recent stats on internet usage by age, but here's a good one on the aging eye: http://www.ergogero.com/pages/agingeye.html
05 Jul 2003 | Ben Langhinrichs said...
I tried to read the article, but being fairly strongly color blind myself, I had trouble with the samples looking too similar. Sigh! Anyway, thanks for posting.
07 Jul 2003 | Blakems said...
I am currently working on a site for a client that wants his site to be colorblind friendly. Their current site is not easily read by those that are color blind. I have been using a filter in photoshop that lets you see how a colorblind person would see a design. It works great, get is here Vischeck as a free download.
15 Jul 2003 | Tzicha said...
Hey, thanks for posting that. Like Ben Langhinrichs mentioned, I too am colour-blind and was more than confused looking at the samples provided: each looked the same. I'll have to find a colour-seeing person to tell me what the differences are. Nonetheless, the site will be quite useful to me. Thanks.
17 Jan 2004 | Eli said...
For example, if you see an AIM window peeking out from behind your browser and you click on it, that window will come to the front, but the main application window will not. The Mail.app/Activity Viewer is another example. The Aqua system of layers works well in many instances, but not in all. Thank goodness that the Dock is always there to come to the rescue. I know that clicking on an application icon in the Dock will always result in not only the application coming to the front, but also any non-minimized windows associated with it. And if the application is active but no windows are open, clicking on the Dock icon should create a new window in that application.
