stuff to read, apparently/may 2010

black or white?

so what colour do you think it is?…

tricky blighter, colour on the web as is demonstrated every now and again when a client comments the logo’s not the ‘right’ colour on their website.

Usually what they mean is that the logo on their screen doesn’t look like it’s the same colour as on their letterhead. Umm, no, it very probably isn’t. Or yes it is, it’s exactly the same. Or it might be. Or it might not.

Your guess is as good as mine…

Truth is, I know what it looks* like on my monitor, but I don’t know what it looks like on yours, because I’ve no idea how yours is set-up. For all I – or very often, you – know, you might have your screen set far too bright, too dull, or it might be smeared with a thin film of Branston Pickle.

* Being a smartarse, I also know how it measures on my monitor.

The real problem is that in the world of smearing coloured grease on dead trees (or ‘printing’ as some people refer to it) there are known absolutes, ie. if I'm designing something for print, I know exactly what size the paper is, what colour it is, what the print process is and what the ink formulas are. You may well have heard of the Pantone Matching System (PMS), used by the print industry to ensure that a printer in Glasgow produces exactly the same result from any given colour reference as a printer in Guadalajara or Ganzhou.

Looks a bit dodgy to me…

Unfortunately displaying things on screen has no real equivalent. (Actually, that’s not true, but it’s a system which isn’t really widely supported). And in any case many user’s monitors aren’t very well set-up.

A simple test. Look at the first greyscale image below. If your display’s of good quality and reasonably accurately set, you should see a different shade of grey from solid black to white in graded increments.**

test_greyscale

If you don’t, the brightness/contrast settings on your display are a bit off. Sorry. Try adjusting them. If your display makes it difficult to distinguish between the lighter increments on the top strip and looks something like the strip below, your settings have your screen too bright:

test_too_bright

If on the other hand you see something more like the strip below, your display is too dark (over-bright is by far the most common). Sorry, I haven’t devised a test for detecting Branston Pickle yet, although the lumpy bits can be a bit of a give-away.

test_too_dark

Bugger. What about red?

Or green? Pink? Blue? Orange? You see the problem. If getting even a simply greyscale image to display ‘correctly’ is less than straightforward, you can see why colour’s a bit tricky to say the least. It’s the problem which bedevils the likes of online clothing retailers, customer opens the box and discovers the colour’s not remotely what they thought it was, and back goes another cardie…

So what’s the answer?

There isn’t one. Because as a designer I pretty much have to know what colour something is, I have a pretty fancy monitor. Actually I have three pretty fancy monitors, but the really fancy one is colour-calibrated with a clever gizmo attached which even takes into account the amount of ambient light in the room and adjusts my display accordingly.

Very clever. And, unfortunately, very expensive. The other two monitors in my office are set to more typical settings, largely so I can judge web-based colour on more ‘normal’ displays (and drag an image from one screen to each of the other two to demonstrate how the perceived colour changes).

You can try this at home or in the office yourselves, look at the same colour image on three different computers and I suspect you might be surprised at the differences. (By the way, every ‘netbook’ I’ve seen has a really crap display – how else do you think they can flog them that cheaply?)

On a wing and a (hardware-calibrated) prayer…

So all I can do is make sure the colour’s pretty much correct when it leaves here and hope for the best when you look at it. Display quality is improving, but it’s still pretty variable, especially among cheaper ones.

Just to confuse things even further, different browsers display colour differently depending on whether they support the colour profiling system I mentioned earlier. The composite image below is taken from two screengrabs on the same monitor, the two pics on the left are from Firefox 3, the two on the right from Internet Explorer 8. Hmm.

So what colour do you think your logo is now?

test-colour

** Most laptop displays will struggle to show every gradation unless you’ve got a ‘high-end’ model produced in the last 18-24 months. Higher quality displays create a greater drain on batteries, so on older/cheaper models, quality is often compromised as a trade-off.

Many laptop displays will also automatically dim the display when running on the battery, which also alters the perceived colour.

I was just typing thinking…

corporate + brand identity | graphic design | website design | dog walking

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