The divide between software functionality and appearance, or development and design, has been around for some time. The advent of the WWW has increased this divide, one measure being the increased headcount required to bring an application to market. The attendant costs can have some subtle sources.

Today’s software technology can make products that do amazing things, at least from a functional point of view. So much so, that functionality may be considered as a commodity. In which case, any differentiator has to be something more direct, and the best example of that is what something looks like.

The plumbing of functionality may be prosaic, but the sizzle has to be the visual design, a fact that designers are quite happy about. Much of that sizzle has to do with color, knowledge of which is a designer forte, much more so than the developer. So when decisions related to colors are made, the creative designer typically has more say than other team members.

And this can lead to some interesting problems that ultimately impact time and costs, because there are a lot of colors, and choosing one can be a matter of esthetics, sometimes construed as projection of egos.

As a practical matter, any given monitor can only render so many measurable colors, far fewer than any potential color palette. Even worse, any measurements for any monitor will change over time, even short intervals. And, to add even more complexity, humans can only perceive a relatively limited number of colors, which also varies over time.

This is not a new problem. Printers and their customers have had to deal with this for many years. Inks can vary from batch to batch, as can the material being printed. Paper, even on huge rolls, can have different characteristics during a roll’s run that impact measurable color, for a variety of reasons: humidity, water content, roughness, variations in surface tension, even the reflection from an adjacent page. None of these are absolutely predictable.

Color management of web pages can be greatly simplified by limiting the color palette to the 216 ‘web safe’ colors, which can save a lot of time, hence money, in designing the sizzle’s color, not to mention the potential emotional costs of having to deal with creatives’ demands for exploiting what, in effect, is an infinite resource.

Maintenance of a web page has some interesting challenges after the creatives have moved on to bigger and better things, or when no one remembers why a particular color was used. Fortunately, this potential problem can be measured in advance. All that is needed is a tool, preferably automatic, that examines web pages for colors that are not ‘web safe’, as declared in the web pages themselves, the ancillary cascading style sheets, and image files themselves.

At the very least, having these numbers beforehand can defuse contentious discussions. And, not least, they inform pricing, which can be extremely helpful in eliminating surprises for the customer after the maintenance work is completed.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: color management, creative design, maintenance costs, web design, web safe colors

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 0:50 and is filed under Software That Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.