Reinventing the Color Wheel
Pantone's new color tool covers old ground
By Bob Schmitt
September 19, 1997
Digital ink. That's Pantone's problem — there's no such thing. So how does the leading ink-on-paper company get a slice of the burgeoning Web design marketplace? Simple, use the same business model they've been successful with for decades — "invent" a new color system and sell swatches to designers. The only problem is, they didn't invent the color system, any more than the writers of the many Web design books out there did. And, though Pantone's newest tool may prove to have some usefulness to Web designers, you may find that there are more than enough tools available for free on the Web.
A little color history
By now, anyone working as a Web designer has heard of the "Web-safe" or "browser-safe" palette. Originally called the Netscape palette, the Web-safe palette is used to display colors on 8-bit Windows systems by all browsers based on the original NCSA Mosaic browser (i.e. Netscape, Internet Explorer, et al). This palette, chosen by the original developers of the Mosaic browser, is actually just a subset of the Macintosh System palette (minus the last 40 colors, which were reserved for the browser's interface and Windows operating system). The palette was created with the idea that Web page builders could select from a common set of colors that would display, without dithering, across both platforms. The Web-safe RGB palette information was first published on Netscape's site as part of their technical notes for version 1.0 and quickly became known as "The Netscape Palette" — due to Netscape's overwhelming popularity at the time. Subsequently, every Web design book author and tool maker has claimed (or implied) that they created the palette — and Pantone is no exception.
Enter Pantone's ColorWeb
As their first entry into the Web design tools market, Pantone has released ColorWeb, a $30 package for the Macintosh, which includes an extension to the Apple System Color Picker and a Pantone-style swatch book — the kind which Pantone has become famous for. On its own, the swatch book is useful, although, despite its being printed with Pantone's six-color Hexachrome process, there is an inevitable shift in the accuracy of the colors as they appear on screen. In fact, I found many of the printed colors to be quite a few shades off from the color as it appears on screen. Still, the book gives a reasonable approximation of most colors, which can at least get you in the ball park for selecting colors on your Web pages.
Pantone's ColorWeb swatch book.
More useful is the Apple Color Picker extension. While the ColorWeb extension is not useful in programs like Photoshop which has created its own more advanced color picker (also, I find it much easier to load the Web-safe palette CLUT as Photoshop Swatches and select colors from there), the real usefulness of ColorWeb comes in programs like PageMill, which do not have sophisticated color management tools. The ColorWeb extension adds an entry to the Apple Color Picker called "PANTONE ICS" (Internet Color System) which, when selected, displays the colors of the Web-safe palette as swatches neatly arranged by hue.
While it is nice to have this swatch palette available to choose colors while within an application such as PageMill, its usefulness breaks down with Pantone's insistence on using a proprietary numbering system (which is another thing Pantone is well-known for). For example, a purple with an RGB value of 204, 51, 204 and a hexadecimal value of CC33CC becomes "N 12-04" under the Pantone system — a number that has no meaningful value to a designer, except for being able to look it up in the Pantone swatch book so you can translate it to a useful number. The numbering system was an unfortunate choice for Pantone as it adds another time-consuming step to your work. And, heaven help you if you lose or misplace your swatch book, because without it there's no translation for the PICS code (if you're anything like me, things like that get buried very quickly on your desk — most of the time I can't find a pen and a pad of paper, much less a swatch book). A better choice for Pantone would have been to include RGB and hexadecimal values right on the screen and dispense with the color naming convention. A work-around for designers, is to pick the swatch they want and jump to the Apple RGB selector to get the RGB percentages for the color. And, if you remember the "Rule of 20," (see sidebar below) it's an easy matter to convert those percentages to RGB numbers or hexadecimal — although it would be nicer to have them right on the screen.
Is ColorWeb worth the price?
Is ColorWeb worth $30? For around $30 you can buy a whole book on Web design with its many tips and tricks, most of which include the same color palette information presented in a variety of ways. Many of these books come with CDs which include color palettes for use in your favorite graphics programs. Of course, print designers who have moved to the Web may find the Pantone swatch book very familiar and comforting to use, and a little less cumbersome than a book. While I have to say, I like having the color swatches available in the Apple Color Picker for use in PageMill, I could most definitely live without them. And, with most graphics programs updating to include the Web palette (Photoshop's newest version includes the Web palette as a choice in its Indexed Color dialog box) the usefulness of this extension is rapidly diminishing.
The Rule of 20
All Web-safe RGB values are increments of 20% (i.e. 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100), 20% of 255 is 51, 40% is 102, and so on. So, all Web-safe RGB colors are combinations of 0, 51, 102, 153, 204 and 255 (note they are all multiples of 51 — or 20%). In hexadecimal these values convert to 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF (all multiples of 33 — or 20%).
Copyright © 2012 Robert Schmitt. All rights reserved.