- Understanding Hexadecimal
There are really three parts to a six digit hexadecimal number. The first
two digits stand for RED, the second two for GREEN, and the third two
digits for BLUE.
All you really need to know about hexadecimal for B&W design
is that if you keep all three elements the same, you will always have
a grey color. The most common gray colors you'll find online are 000000,
333333, 666666, 999999, CCCCCC and FFFFFF, but combinations
like 0A0A0A, B5B5B5, and 323232 will also work.
- BODY tags: Links, Visited Links and Active Links
You can specify the colors of most of the important parts of your web
page with elements in your BODY tag. Links require the addition of something
like this -- LINK="#000000" -- to your BODY tag. This will make
the links black, but you can use any hexadecimal number between the
quotes.
A complete BODY tag looks like this:
<BODY BGCOLOR="FFFFFF" LINK="#000000" TEXT="#000000" VLINK="#666666" ALINK="#CCCCCC">
The BGCOLOR element changes the color of your background, and the
TEXT element changes the color of your regular text.
Note: If you use stylesheets on your webpage, the principals above still
apply, but the implementation will be different..
- Make all your images Black and White:
If you have a program like photoshop, this is easy. Change the image mode
to grayscale (or use the desaturate feature). Some graphics programs use
different terms for Black and White modes, look around until you find
something that looks right.
It is also usually pretty easy to scan your images directly in Black and White.
Then save your file as normal.
NOTE: The "websafe" pallet only actually contains 6 shades of black
and white, (including black and white!) and if you don't stick to just those
six shades, your images may dither in older browsers. I prefer to use photoshop's save for web option, and if you save as a gif, there is an option to choose what percentage of the image you want to be websafe (web "snap"). This is fun to play with. Try taking a B&W photo and converting it to 100% websafe gif to see what I mean.
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