The Safety Palette

November 22, 1996

Robert B. Hess
Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Developer Relations Group

The Safety Palette Color Picker

To help you get a better visual sense of the colors that make up the safety palette (the set of 216 colors that won't dither when used for GIF images), I've prepared a couple of tables that use the BGCOLOR attribute of a table cell to display the color.

In each colored cell, I am inserting a transparent GIF image. The ALT text of the GIF image is set to the hexadecimal RGB value for the color it is representing. If you are using Microsoft® Internet Explorer 3.0, simply move your mouse cursor over the color you are interested in to see a tooltip that displays the assocated RGB value. I've also set an anchor around each image, with the HREF also set to the hexadecimal RGB value that the image represents. Thus, the appropriate RGB value should show up in your status bar as well.

Table 1: Top-to-Bottom Perspective

In this first table, I am simply listing all 216 colors that are part of the safety palette. Notice how the table blocks up very nicely into six 6x6 squares. Think of each square as a separate "slice" of the color cube described by the safety palette.

The Safety Palette

There is one column named "Co#" in each color chart. If you need to find colors that will work satisfactorily together in a single web page, you can use any colors with the same Co# (Coordinating Number) and feel safe with them. Not every chart nor every color has a Co#. Depending on the colors, some colors may appear in more than one color chart grouping.

Links

Visibone Web-Safe Swatch Collections. See also their article: Building a Better Color Picker

Professional Web Design, a JavaScript approach.

Colours for the Colour Blind