[NBLUG/talk] NBLUG T-Shirt and Web Logo Contest

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Mon Jul 14 09:59:01 PDT 2003


On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 10:39:06PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 03:51:37PM -0700, ME wrote:
> > That is 200 more colors than my old Apple ][ had when it was in
> > double-high-res mode. :-P
> 
> Hehe... It's about 50 less than my Atari 8-bit. ;^)
> 
> 
> > Besides, there are still Linux users out there with video cards that
> > support only 256 colors.
> 
> True, but that doesn't mean they can display _those_ 216 colors very well!
> I say, let the browser decide the best way to 'fit' colors, rather than
> just dumbing it down for everyone (and potentially making it look even _WORSE_
> on low-color displays).

You know...  I wish I'd thought about that bit more before Augie sent stuff
out (I got to see the announcement page early)...

There is no "web safe" palette.

(okay, that's not strictly true: both #000000 and #ffffff are totally safe
everywhere)

The "palette"s in question:
1) 8-bit color, picking colors that are already likely to be on the screen
on a PC, Mac, etc. -- (8 bit palette created from 24-bit selection)
2) 8-bit color, picking whatever colors you want.
3) 24-bit color.  (anything claiming to be "32-bit" is really 24-bit)
4) 16-bit color
5) Sometimes there's 15-bit, but it's uncommon.  

You really run into problems when you get to the 16-bit palettes.  Typically
16-bit means 5 bits for red, 5 bits for blue and 6 bits for green.  What
this ends up meaning is that, other than black and white, a 16-bit palette
shares no colors with 24-bit.  There's some simple enough math for picking
the closest color, but there's a number of spots where there's 2 equally
good choices some browsers have been known to have one portion of their
rendering engine go one direction and another portion go the other
direction.  (meaning that a graphic on a colored background may not match,
even if its supposed to be the same color)

Heck, even with mozilla 1.2.1 on a 16-bit display (Linux) some of these test
examples show a difference:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/stuff2a/complete_websafe_216/test.html
(if you can see a hint of a square in any of those, a color didn't match
itself between <td bgcolor=> and inside a gif, which is an issue for a lot
of designs, though admittedly not for http://nblug.org/ since we have the
logo on a white background)

Besides, look at those colors.  Most of them are horribly ugly!  Garish. 
That 6x6x6 palette was picked entirely mathematically and consists entirely
of high-saturation colors.  (since low color saturation requires color
triplets with less space between them than 6x6x6 allows)

Given the now-low number of 8-bit-display users, and the fact that I have
both working eyeballs and good color vision, I'm inclined to give higher
marks to logo designs that totally ignore that 216 color thing, unless they
somehow manage to look good with that palette.  But, then, I'd also love to
see a lugod.org style resizable logo more than the suggested fixed-width
logo...  Everybody can safely ignore me, since Augie's running this contest.

Oh yeah, also note: that palette only ever applies to areas of solid color. 
Thin lines of color or any kind of gradient can be whatever color, since
dithering on those generally isn't too ugly.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244
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