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If It’s Web Safe, Don’t Use It

 

The one palette that we absolutely don’t use at all anymore is the Web-safe Color palette (choose Web Color Sliders from the Color palette’s flyout menu). Why? You don’t need it—and it can make your file sizes significantly larger than necessary. The Web-safe colors were created back when most computer users had computers that could only display a maximum of 256 colors. Out of those 256, the “Web-safe” colors were the 216 colors that were the same on both Macintosh and Windows browsers. Even back then you could still use a non-Web-safe color, but it might dither to the next closest Web-safe color so the color might be off a bit. However, if you’ve ever looked at a row of monitors at the computer store, you’ll notice the color is slightly different on every one, but that’s another story. Luckily these days, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone using such a lame computer that it only displays 256 colors. They haven’t sold a computer like that for literally years.

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1 Comment

  1. kara said on — September 26, 2008 @ 9:50 am

    Haven’t seen the word “dither” in years ; )

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Invert to Alpha

When working with vector - created art and the source art is unavailable, modifying the art to create a logo can be a pain, to say the least—particularly when it’s flattened and the background needs to be knocked out.  A careful combination of Invert (Command - I [PC: Ctrl - I]), Color Balance (Command - B [PC: Ctrl - B]), and layer Blending Options (Control-click [PC: Right-click] the layer name) can yield simple background knockouts of one- or two-color logos without making a mess.

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