Prose Exercise # 9 - Outdated hues

This picture caught my eye because of it's rainbow properties, I'm always drawn to multi-colored images. From www.lynda.com "non dithering colors by hue" Used without permission.

A grid of unlikely squares of color with letters and numbers (levels of Red, Green and Blue components). For the technically minded.

But the context works right into memoir/personal history. This grid was prepared as a guide for web designers by technical experts, of safe recommended colors to use, that would display properly for monitors that only displayed 256 colors. Remember some of the early web pages, full of dancing baloney (my husband's term) and garish color combinations. Often the designer didn't mean for the colors to be so dreadful, but because of limited standardization and equipment, you could not be sure what was really going to be displayed. So this was a grid of 'safe' colors. Use these hues and you could reasonably be sure that your website would display as you intended. As web designer Lynda Weinman pointed out, these hues maybe fit in from a technical standpoint but not from a design or aesthetic perspective. Not enough light or pastel background colors and some pretty jarring tones.

But, it doesn't matter any more! Now, just about everybody has equipment which will show many colors. Designers still need to take color values and design into account but web browsers and monitors now can reliably reproduce colors. It used to be important but no longer. A prior constraint. Relevant in its day but a period piece now.

Is it important? As a reminder of why web design in the mid 90s looked so crazy? About efforts to try to make the web a reasonable mass medium? Flashback from the past?

Often we think that we can control things ourselves when the true constraints may be out of our hands. The primary myth involved with the the self-help movement is that through our own efforts, we can improve our situation by thinking correctly or changing our attitude. But the real determinants may be outside our control, extrinsic physical, economic or social forces which shape our times and our lives.