Web Safe Colors - Hexadecimal Colors

Web safe colors are those colors that are already installed in your browser. Todays modern computers can read and correctly display millions of colors so web safe colors are no longer an issue, in developed countries anyway.

Any computer with 24 bit color and higher has millions of colors. Older computers with 16 bit color had 65,536 colors and those with only 8 bit color only have 256 colors.

So if your traffic stats show you have considerable traffic from third world countries and 8 bit computers then you may want to stick with web safe colors shown in the color chart below.

Hexadecimal Web Safe Color Chart

Hexadecimal Web Safe Color Chart
Used with permission by
© 2000 VisiBone

To use these colors set up a class in your CSS file for whichever color you want like this:

.red {color:#FF0000;}

Then apply it to your document using the Hex code for that color, like this:

<div class="red">This text is red instead of the normal black.</div>

Other websites with information on web safe colors.

For an explanation of hexadecimal color codes see Hex Color Codes and How to Use them

Here is a site that explains Bit Depth in more detail

On this site you can Test Your Color Depth

You can check out some Pantone Color Guides here.

The Color Wizard site provides an online tool where you can input a color and get complimentary colors or different shades of the same color.

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Lori Eldridge
Copyright © June 2004 - updated 11-01-23
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