CONTRIBUTOR: Shahjahan Alhassan - 13th Oct 2001

Particular industries that requires extra attention to the issue of colour are those involved in desk top publishing (DTP), textiles, design and those requiring matching production of on screen colours onto other mediums. It can cause major problems to clients if their system doesn't reproduce faithfully, they need to know that what they see is what they'll get.


So how can this be combated? Pantone have developed a colour matching system which standardises certain colours to allow for exact reproduction. However, each industry has its own special design and manufacturing needs. To solve this they have developed colour systems which are medium specific, such as textiles and plastics. Pantone is now the definitive international reference for selecting, specifying and matching printed colours, complying with ISO 9002 quality assurance guidelines (Pantone.com).

With the uptake of Internet technology expanding at an increasing rate among companies, a colour matching system is essential to take full advantage of this medium. Currently there is no guarantee that the colour used in the design of an Internet page is the same colour that will be seen on a user's computer. As a result, images or graphics that are represented in colour cannot be used with the assurance that the user will view the same colour as the original.

Pantone have come up with the 'Internet Colour System Guide'', which provides two hundred and sixteen 'Internet-safe' colours with corresponding RBG values. Claiming that each will reproduce accurately on any monitor and output device (Financial Times, 1996). If designing a system requiring accurate reproduction of colours on screen, it would be in the system designers best interest to be aware of such standards and to integrate them into the system's design.


Another aspect of the Internet related to this is the transmission of graphic files. Speeds of data transmission vary according to the size of files being sent. The larger the file the longer it takes to be received. One way to minimise this time is to reduce the number of colours used by these files. Graphic file can contain between 2 and 16.7 million colours. Obviously the more colours you have the better the image quality, but what about those people who have graphics cards that can only handle up to 256 colours? They have to wait longer for files to be received and converted into a viewable format (Weinmann, 1996).

Overcoming this is fairly simple. Firstly, what kind of hardware is your audience expected to have? If they're large companies then they're most likely to have the equipment to view 16.7 million colour images without any problems. But if your efforts are directed to the general public then not everyone can enjoy the splendour of these graphics. The best way to cater for them is to convert images to the reduced colour format to reduce transmission time, but resulting in reduced image quality. Should you be in the situation where you cater for a varied clientele, images for different formats could be stored.

This situation will eventually resolve itself, with the decreasing price of hardware. Soon almost everyone will be capable of viewing colour intensive files and therefore eliminating this problem.