Another Cool Color Tool

R35's new webColor Pad makes picking colors easy

By Bob Schmitt
November 28, 1997

Tired of doing all that hexadecimal color math? Can't remember off-the-top-of-your-head what color CCFF66 is? Just wish you had all the browser-safe colors and corresponding hexadecimal values right there in front of you?

Well, we've just discovered another cool tool that solves all those problems: the webColor Pad from R35.

Click for a closer view.

This nifty little tool is actually a mousepad with all 216 of the browser-safe colors and their matching hexadecimal equivalents. Now you can have your color palette literally at your fingertips, er, well, mousetip anyway.

The one unavoidable drawback is that it is printed in CMYK (the standard for full-color printing), which has a much different gamut than RGB. This causes the color reproduction to be off, sometimes by many shades -- the same fate suffered by other printed versions of the browser-safe palette such as Pantone's ColorWeb swatch book. Still, it gives a good approximation of the color you're looking for and should quickly get you in the ballpark of where you want to be. And for only $12.95 (USD), this is a tool every designer is going to want on his or her desktop.