Your Colors are Safe on the Web

There was a time when the "websafe palette" was valuable. I even had an hour long presentation on the topic. Today, the most modern Adobe products still have the palette checkbox in their webchooser dialogs. Its time for that feature, as well as the palette chooser item in the Save For Web drop down, to be axed.(That feature should have never been there in the first place, since you should never have limited all your colors in your image just to the palette)

So designers, if you have not already done so long ago, it is time to stop limiting yourselves to those 216 colors called websafe. (Although many designers are either too young, too stubborn, or too insensitive to have use websafe colors in the first place.) For those experienced, true conscientious and craftsavey designers out there, who might not have gotten the memo, Im hear to tell you, drop the web palette. Why? For both mac and pcs, 256 color settings have not even been an option for computer users for over 5 years.

Note: most designers didn’t get it right to begin with. You can blame that on Adobe and Lynda Weinman (sorry Lynda). But lets save that topic for the history books.

It is time to move forward Adobe. For the sake of digital craftsmanship please do these three things in Illustrator and Photoshop: 1) remove "Only Web Colors" checkbox from the color picker, 2) remove the "Restictive (web palette) from the Save for Web dialog's "Color Reduction Algorithm" drop down, 3) Remove "Web" as an option as the index color dialog when saving as a gif.

Thats all. I want to thank those of you who were trying to do the right thing by using websafe, but it is time to move on.