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February 18, 1997
Limit Yourself:
Small and Safe Color Palettes
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Gif Girl believes in expressing herself fully... but that doesn't mean that she refuses to limit herself. When it comes to color palettes, that is. Using fewer colors in your images means smaller file sizes; and that means a faster download time for all those poor folks on 9600 modems and the like. Gif Girl knows: It doesn't matter what your graphics look like if people turn their images off! So make those downloads snappy!
Being faithful to the Safe Palette of colors means that your graphics will look good on a maximum number of machines. What does Gif Girl mean by "good"? Well, you won't get nasty "dithering", which is the blotchy speckles you'll see in graphics when your monitor is set to 8 bit/256 colors:
Dithered/Unsafe Graphic (L) vs.
Safe Palette Graphic (R)
You see all those specks on the background of the image to the left? Yuck! You can avoid the dithers by only using Colors found in the Safe Palette. For a better explanation of why the Safe Palette is safe, check out Lynda Weinman's site.
Note: These guidelines are best used for illustrations (like the one in the above example) with areas of flat color. Complicated images with lots of shading like 3D and photographic images are usually better saved as JPGs.
So here you go! There are two main steps to greating safe graphics...and you gotta follow both!
How to Load the Safe Palette CLUT
Indexing Your Graphics Correctly
Gif Girl knows that these instructions are detailed and technical, but if you follow them carefully, your graphics will slide onto other people's screens like spoonfuls of sugar. One small set of instructions from Gif Girl, one large step towards making the Web a quicker, less annoying place...
NEXT TIME:
Small and Safe Techniques:
Gif Girl will follow up in the coming weeks with some specific graphics techniques for using limited palettes...they are your friends!
Gif Girl, when she isn't out saving the world from dithered graphics and illegible Web pages, helps keep Tripod's pages running fast and furious.
Send your comments, ideas, suggestions, and of course, your solutions for saving the world from bad Web page design, to Gif Girl. She'd love to hear from you.
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