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Color
Want to find some good shades for your web site and you need the RGB values? Or maybe you want to keep your colors web safe? Try ColorMix(tm).
ColorMix provides a nifty utility that allows you to click a color that you find attractive on their color "cube", and it will give you the RGB values for that color. Then you can dither the color to find 2 or three web-safe colors.
After you go to the ColorMix page, and click on "Take me to the mixer", select Method 1, their new color mixer. This will give you the color "cube" from which you can choose your colors.
The Colors to Choose From
As you can see from this snapshot from the ColorMix page, I've picked a blue-ish tone that has the RGB values of 59, 215, 255. Whats RGB? On your monitor, colors are created by mixing three primary colors -- red, green, and blue. By using different amounts of these three colors, you can obtain millions of different shades on today's monitors.
You can also see that I've dithered my color selection to 2 web-safe colors. What's that mean? Earlier monitors could only represent 256 colors. Those 256 colors were the web-safe pallet. If you used one of these 256 colors, you could be reasonably sure that the monitor would display your color more-or-less as you intended. However, if you used one of the non-web-safe colors, the color might be displayed using a technique called dithering. Dithering is a way to create a color by displaying dots of similar colors close together so that your eyes blend the colors together to make the intended color -- sort of. Because a web page designer couldn't be sure exactly how the dithered colors would look on different monitors, it was safer to use the web-safe colors. As people are replacing their older monitors, the need to restrict your web colors to the web-safe pallet is diminishing. But you can still use the web-safe colors to be sure that all users have a better chance to see the colors you intended them to see.
Another nice thing about the color mixer is the ability to go up and down the shade of a single color by using the separate vertical color bar on the right of the color square. The color bar has a light blue-ish color at the top and black at the bottom, with progressively darker shades as you move down the bar. As you may know, a single color can look different depending upon how much of it is used. If you are using a color for small text, you'll need to use a much darker shade to get the same effect of using a lighter color in a big square. The vertical color bar will make sure that you're still using the same hue, just a lighter or darker one.
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