Web Corporate Identity Guidelines Colour References

Help with Colour references

• Harmonising image colours and Web safe HTML colours
• Convention used for University Logo Image References
• Useful Web sites

Web Safe Colours

How do you create Web safe Images? Both HTML colour codes and Graphics packages (like Photoshop and Paintshop Pro) commonly describe colour as a combination of three elements which are always in the same order: Red, Green and Blue. However HTML colour codes use 'Hexadecimal' (base 16)  numbers and Graphics packages use 'Decimal' (base 10) numbers to represent these settings. The simplest way to coordinate your buttons or other images with your HTML table or link colours is to use the following quick look up table of 6 values based on the 216 Web Colour Cube: 

· 6 possible values for Red, 
· 6 possible values for Green and 
· 6 possible values for Blue.

For example:

Color="#003366" would give you Red 000, Green 051 and Blue 102 

If your HTML colour code or images colour sample contains a value which is not one of these 6,
it is NOT a Web safe colour.

For example:

Color="#0033C5" would give you Red 000, Green 051 and Blue 197

Convention used for University Logo Image References

The Corporate Identity information has been organised around style and colour. The style is determined by University, Department and Individual Sections. The colour is identified by a hexidecimal value to be matched easily to HTML colour values used in Web documents. The Logos are stored according to their background colour:

<img src="http://www.le.ac.uk/corporateid/[style]/[hexvalue]/unilogo.gif>

where [] indicates a value 
· style is determined by each level e.g. departmenthome, department, departmentresource 
· hexvalue (in lower case) is the hexadecimal value for a specific browser safe colour - white is ffffff, black is 000000.

Example

The default set of browser safe colours provided as the background for the University logo:  

Useful Web sites

• Webmaster Colour Laboratory
• Colour and Vision Database  - the Background Information link on the main page gives useful information about the perception of colour.

Last updated: 13 December 2001
University Web Maintainer
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