Web Color Is a Pain In The A**

THERE – I said it. Sue me.

After 13 years in the Web I never thought I would become a Color Hater. I mean come on! I should be thanking my lucky stars on a daily basis that I’m not a print designer where color would haunt my waking hours, shake me from dread-filled-press-check nightmares in a cold sweat and fill my head with foreign concepts that I’m challenged to parse. Swatch books. CMYK vs spot color. ICC profiles. Ink draw downs. Press characterizations. Spectrodensitometers. Substrate ink absorption. Monitor calibration to the micron. And ::gasp:: resolutions above 72 dpi. Just thinking about is enough to make me break out in hives.

In truth, the web has come a long way in terms of how we manage color. We all remember the dark days of ye old web-safe palette. “What do you mean I can only use 216 colors — I’m an Artist! How do expect me to work under these circumstances?” Over time, monitor sizes and resolution have increased, new web graphic optimization models and formats have emerged, true standards based design has exploded on the scene, and the list of technological improvements can go on and on and on. But the bottom line is that now we can be nearly 100% confident that what we create on our machine will still bear more than a passing resemblance on the end-user’s screen, platform and browser differences notwithstanding. Deus ex machina — we’re saved!

However, all advances aside, I’m starting to get the distinct impression that color is managing us instead, and I’d like to lodge a formal complaint.

Recently I had a color run-in, which heretofore will be known as “The day I wondered why I didn’t go to law school after all”. While developing a design for one of our clients, the graphic files ended up passing through many hands per our usual design & production process. As careful as I thought I had been with keeping the colors true through the workflow, when we had a test site to look at, it became clear that something was rotten in the state of Firefox. Suddenly, inexplicably, the organization’s blue logo stubbornly refused to match the rest of the page in a glaringly “I gotta be MEEE” sort of way.

No problem. I’m a trained professional. This is cake, I said to myself, giddily cloaked with the hubris of web color/technology superhero powers. I adjusted the “official” logo color to match the site (with client permission of course) and optimized that puppy as a browser-friendly, alpha-channeled, gamma-corrected .png. The logo shifted color in the browser before my eyes, sneering at me as if to say “You’ll need to do better than THAT.” I played with a PMS/Hex color translator to ensure the colors were identical. The universe mocked my pain. I even changed all color profiles and re calibrated my monitors before optimizing for the millionth time. The logo staunchly refused to play ball. And then, for a brief shining moment, I got it to work (in Firefox) only to see it shift again (in IE). I always knew Microsoft was out to get me.

In the end, the developer, PM and I decided the only option was one last Hail Mary pass, and that if we failed, we’d draw straws to decide who’d tell the client their logo was as un-matchable as a gay Buddhist on eHarmony.

I. Made. It. a . JPG.

Praise the lord and pass the potatoes — it worked. I could bore you with why I think it worked (Format and cross browser incompatibilities, lossy vs lossless image compression which affected the bit depth indexing and shifted the color to the closest available shade) but I’d like to think it’s simple as this: I was making it all too complex because I could. The GOWC (Gods Of Web Color, for those playing the home game) clearly wanted to teach me a lesson that day, and it wasn’t just “You’d have sucked as a lawyer.” Perhaps in the end, no matter how far you think you’ve come on the web, sometimes you just have to kick it old school.

Be Sociable, Share!

•