“Web-Safe” Colors

Colors By Defined Color Name

Colors By Hexadecimal Color Code

The “standard” color scheme consists of limiting the base colors, Red/Green/Blue, to six (6) hexadecimal values each:

This yields 6 x 6 x 6 == 216 standard colors. Of course most modern displays are capable of many more colors than this, but these 216 colors can be displayed directly without 'dithering', even on modest hardware. What this means is that the color you select will be displayed identically regardless of hardware or browser used.

Of course the idea of “standard” display colors is somewhat ridiculous because several of the “named colors” above are not among the “standard” color list, and because the display's brightness and contrast settings have a strong effect on color perception.

Our chart is a bit different from some other color charts you may see. Instead of simply displaying a table of the 216 colors, we display the colors in a series of 6x6 and 5x5 mathematical sequences so you can see the color progression and compare near-matches side-by-side. Color saturation (“colorfulness”) increases from upper-left to lower-right as the hexadecimal value of the individual color components decrease.

(Note that color saturation, chroma, hue and other elements of color science are technically complex issues which your author makes no claim to fully understand. The most we can claim is some modest understanding of how wavelength is related to hexadecimal color notation.)

Color Table (hex color code without duplications)